Racing, not hiking, up Goat Fell

Would it be stressful or exciting to add a competitive element to our day out on Arran?

Uma up on Goat Fell

I remember once sitting with a bunch of elite British athletes in Iten, Kenya, and asking them what they thought was the biggest difference in the way they and the Kenyan athletes trained. They all answered unanimously, without hesitation, with one word: “Rest.”

Rest is where the actual adaption to training happens. You push yourself in a long run or interval session, say, and your muscles etc break down. Then, during the recovery stage, the rest, they repair stronger than before. Without that stage of the cycle, training is basically pointless; you’ll just get more and more tired, and eventually your body will force you to rest by getting ill or injured.

That’s a long-winded way of justifying why I’ve barely run this past week. I’m resting. Adapting. Repairing.

Later this week, I plan to start building things up again. But for now I’m taking it easy.

Although I only ran once last week, I did hike up a mountain in Scotland with my brother and four of our kids. I say hike, but actually it was a race.

My brother decided that to motivate his 10-year-old and 13-year-old to climb the mountain, to make the challenge more exciting, he’d channel their enthusiasm for the TV show Race Across the World. In the show, pairs of people - usually two members of the same family, or two friends - race across various countries, using whatever means they can (usually public transport) to get to the end first.

My brother initially suggested we race up the mountain - Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran - then down the other side, then catch a ferry, race across another island, wild camp for the night, catch another ferry the next day and then scale another mountain before finishing at another ferry port on the far reaches of the far-flung island of Jura.

With three teenagers and a 10-year-old among our group, and two of them racing together without an adult, that seemed a tad ambitious, I thought. I felt like I was being a bit of a kill-joy, but we settled instead on a race up Goat Fell, across a narrow ridge to North Goat Fell, and then down a different way to the village of Corrie. And then we’d all go home.

The teams for the day were me and my 19-year-old daughter, Uma. My brother, Govinda, and his 10-year-old-son, Aiumu. And my son, Ossian, 16, and his 13-year-old cousin, Naowa.

Uma was convinced that me and her were going to win. Naowa didn’t generally give off hardcore mountain-climbing energy, and preferred playing Minecraft than doing anything too exhausting (he was a fairly typical 13-year-old, in other words). And Aiumu was, well, 10 years old. He had little legs.

Uma, on the other hand, had just come back from a hiking trip in the Andes. We were definitely the team to beat.