A True Story

I’ve never seen anything like it. Technically, that’s not true. I’ve seen it on TV. Although something in my brain tells me what I’ve seen on TV was fictional. Nothing I’ve seen in real life, or depicting real life, has been close to this. 

How do you estimate windspeed without equipment or relativity? The fastest wind I’ve ever felt is 70mph. This is faster than that. Much faster. But how much faster is much faster? 20mph? Double? Treble, even? I can’t tell. All I know is it’s faster. Much faster.

Don’t go into the mountains, they told me, not without specialist gear. The snow and ice will be too much for you. How wrong they were. The snow and ice are gone, blown away by the storm. It’s hard to tell how cold it is. Bloody cold is how I’d describe it. It’s surely above freezing but the gusts drag it down to a biting degree.   

I’m lying on the floor, maybe 10 miles from the nearest road. The ridge is exposed. Thinking back, I don’t think I’ve seen a tree all day. The trees are sensible and don’t come up here. A few rocks, but nothing more than a couple of feet high. Nowhere to hide. Saying I’m 10 miles from the nearest road is pure guesswork. My map was split in half by a lusty gust and the half with my position on it blown away into the rocky wilderness. Perhaps one day they’ll invent a device to call for help from the wilderness, but such an innovation doesn’t yet exist, and I don’t have the time to wait for it. 

Standing up seems an impossible task. I’m only on the ground because the wind put me here. I started my run at 7 o’clock in the wintery darkness. It’s midday now. Run? I’m calling it a run, but I’ve spent barely any time running, thought it was my intention. The mountains are a waterslide, with each trodden path now a crude river as the melted snow runs down into the valleys. I’ve jogged, climbed, waded, scumbled, hiked. Walked. 

The breeze at the beach was stiff, I thought. If it’s like that at sea level, what will it be like thousands of feet in the air – that’s what I should have thought. I didn’t. Now, I’m maybe 3000 feet in the sky and regretting such thoughtlessness. 

The man-made wall protected me as I climbed. The drystone technology, present in human structures for generations, held firm against a pummeling. Upon reaching its end and the apex of the ridge, I found a left turn into the exposed air. There’s no wall here, just post and wire fencing. Thin strips of wire do little to stifle the storm. 

It was upon reaching the fencing and making my left turn that I found the wind unmanageable. Perhaps eight or nine paces into the newfound strength of the gale, I needed to lay down. Since then, perhaps 100 paces at a time in the strongest of wind, which warps and rattles my hiking poles. My biggest fear is they’re going to snap. No, that’s my second fear. My biggest fear is something in my body will break. 

With each pace, I gained elevation. With each foot of elevation, the wind gained speed. Not only that, but the weather conditions worsened. Drizzle became rain, which morphed into a downpour. Raindrops hardened into hailstones. I’ve heard the term raining sideways before. Apparently that’s not an expression. The torrent of stones is actually moving laterally, traveling huge distances across the landscape before hitting the ground. I wish I could track the path of one but that’s impossible. Right now, doing anything is impossible.

The exertion of running, or walking, against the storm quickened my heart rate and breathing. My open mouth, lightly panting, had to be clamped shut when the hailstones began to cut into my tongue. I’ll need that tongue again, probably. 

How long was it since I lay down? Lay down. That sounds as if I was in control of the action. I don’t know how long. Maybe 30 minutes. Thirty minutes of getting colder. I’ve started to shiver. Shivering is good, I’ve heard. It’s when you stop shivering that problems happen. Still, if I’m here for a while, it’s not good to be cold. 

My black lycra isn’t keeping me warm but I can’t reach into my pack for the light rain jacket – it’ll surely be blown away. Black! Why did I wear black? They’ll never find me if things go wrong. They’ve already gone wrong. I’m speaking like there’ll be someone looking for me. Mountain rescue don’t know I’m here, do they? I didn’t tell anyone I was here. No one will be worried about me, not for a couple of days anyway, not until Monday when I don’t turn up for work. 

The best endurance running advice I ever received was about the dark times. This is a dark time, so I call upon it. 

Think about why you’re here.

Why am I here? I’m here because people told me I couldn’t. They told me I couldn’t become a mountain racer in my thirties. They told me I couldn’t be an athlete when I was overweight. I’m here because I enjoy the pain. It sounds silly to say but I really, genuinely enjoy the pain. Pain shouldn’t be enjoyable, but it is to me. You see, when I was a child, pain came my way anyway, whether I liked it or not, and I had no choice in the matter. Now, because I can choose pain, endure it at my own pace and of my own volition, I find it empowering.

Moreover, I grow a little stronger each time I inflict it on myself. The torture bestowed upon me as a kid was involuntary, destroyed me from the inside. The torment now builds me up. I’ll never be happy unless I’m in pain. At least, for now, I’m the master of that pain.

I’m thinking of how much stronger I’ll be when this ordeal is done, how much I’ll retrospectively enjoy this pain. The next time this happens, I’ll be so much more prepared. Perhaps I might even be a more interesting person when armed with this story. 

These are agreeable thoughts and for a moment I feel better. But there’s another nagging notion. Another question makes its way into my brain, just as the cold seeps through my sodden gloves and into my skin. What if I’m not more robust, more interesting, better? What if I can’t be these things because I’m dead? 

I feel my heart rate quicken. It’s like I’m jogging. Thud, thud, thud. I’m perfectly still but it goes on. I stop shivering. That’s bad, I tell myself. Either I’m about to fight, or I’m about to die. 

A word visits me from some distant place. It’s one I think I’ve only heard once before. It’s certainly not familiar and I’m only loosely aware of its meaning. Bothy. A bothy. It doesn’t matter if I’m certain of what a bothy is, it only matters if what I think it is actually exists. 

My brain conjures vague imagery of a bothy. A small stone hut, maybe not even large enough for a grown man to stand in. It’s a room with no furniture, no supplies, only shelter. It’s there precisely because it is a shelter. Bothies only exist on peaks and in remote areas, to protect stranded travelers. 

The peaking heartbeat ushers blood into my muscles. I feel them warming. My frozen hands grip tightly against the foam handle of the trekking poles. One stabs into the moss beneath me and then the other. I raise myself to my feet. It’s all I can do immediately, as every muscle in my body tenses against the wall of wind against me. 

Seeing in the hailstorm is hard but I can see enough to know that straight ahead is uphill. The next peak can’t be far. It can, of course, but I tell myself it can’t. Uphill, towards a bothy, if indeed a bothy exists or downhill towards better weather? My feet shuffle to higher ascent. 

Onwards to the bothy, or to death.