Rat Race The Isles - day 5. Lewis - the road to Stornoway

Today started too early. Specifically, it started with a massive crash outside the window at somewhere around 1am. Normally, I'd have taken some interest in what caused it, but no-one in the room paid it the slightest attention - sleep was far more important!

And this was a special night. Since the run for the day actually started at the accommodation, there was no minibus shuttle to get to the start point. We'd therefore been told that we only needed to be ready for a start at 8am - and since we were sleeping in the same place the following night, there was nothing to pack up. 7am alarm! Utter luxury - my alarm time had started with a 5 all week, except for the first day when it was before even that.

All this works, of course, unless you are a white van man. I needed to get the van back to Tarbert before the day's run started, and one of the team had kindly offered to drive down with me and pick me up. So my alarm was on for 6am - still an improvement, but everyone else was still in bed when I dressed and sneaked out of the door. It was when we got outside in the dark we discovered the first problem.

The overnight crash had been the big 2-axle trailer belonging to the centre we were staying at going over on its side, right across the entrance gate. I've no idea what speed the howling wind had hit to manage that - it took three of us to shove the trailer enough out of the way to get the vans out of the gate, and there was certainly no way we were going to right it. Still, once out of the way, I dropped off my van, and became a runner once again. You could tell by the high-speed hobble back to breakfast.

Away at the civilised time, along the road for a couple of miles, and then off onto the trail again. This trail, however, actually existed, and for a short period was even a boardwalk - I need to suggest to the Outer Hebrides council that they extend that a little further. All the way to the bottom of Harris would have been a good start, after yesterday's early adventures.

Above the boardwalk

There was another weird thing in the first part of the morning. We actually saw our first genuine trees. For the first few days of the trip, there wasn't a tree in the place, just heather heath, and finding a tree to relieve yourself was not going to happen. With the absence of trees and lamp posts, I've no idea how dogs manage around here - one assumes they don't just burst?

A real wood!

Anyway, this morning had genuine woodland, if somewhat stunted, which made a nice change, and provided some brief shelter from the inevitable wind and rain showers. It also got me all the way to checkpoint 1 with my feet still dry, which was unheard of. I even found myself working along a fence to avoid stepping through a river I'd have walked through without thinking yesterday. Amazing how reluctant I am to get my feet wet for the first time. Fortunately, this was sorted out by the next bog within 5 minutes of leaving the feedstation.

The sun came out for a while during the next bog stage, and since it was fairly flat (by the previous day's standards) you could look around and enjoy a bit. There was a path of sorts most of the time, and there was a fairly nice skyline to look at, for all that the scenery didn't vary much. 

Bridge from nowhere to nowhere

It was nice not to be on my own for once - I swapped places with J a few times, as we found different routes through the mud, and we could see M in the distance. So with the normal soggy feet, we arrived at lunch, and unlike yesterday actually had time to sit down and eat it.

Which was a good job, because the bogs had obviously worked that this was their last chance to have a go at me, as I wasn't running day 6. In addition, the navigation via my watch failed for the first time. We'd been using supplied GPX files based on someone who finished the previous year, and on this day they had obviously had rather too good a lunch before setting out! The route given by the GPX track was nowhere near the actual route we should be following.

Navigating off the watch had worked superbly for all four days so far, but it does depend on an accurate GPX file - with the size of the watch display, you don't get enough of the map to show more than the immediate surrounding features, so you can't easily correct the route if it does go off. We'd also had several occasions over the previous few days, sometimes for miles, where there was no visible path and no waymarks, and you were just following the GPX line across country, so the fact that there was no obvious path didn't ring warning bells. So J and I just plugged on across the heather following our imaginary line.

Half an hour later, still plugging through heather along our route, we came across a barbed wire fence that the route went straight through. Along with the skeleton of a dead sheep. At this point, having decided that if even the sheep didn't know where they were going we were in trouble, I did what I should have done half an hour before and got my phone out to look at the OS maps app. Yep, we were a mile off route. Pretty much exactly. But at least we now knew where we weren't, and where it was.

Unfortunately, the way back to the route was the other side of the barbed wire fence, and climbing that with 4 days of long running in our legs wasn't the easiest. We got there in the end, and routed back up to the main path at last. We'd probably lost about an hour on that detour, which we could have done without.

The main path was at least visible, so navigation was no longer a problem, but it was another classic Hebrides bog path - slipping, sliding and splashing. There is a technique to handling this sort of surface - I think it starts with actually having a sense of balance - and mine hadn't noticeably improved despite the practice of the last four days. Its a feeling of getting minimal forward movement despite the work you are putting in, and its more frustration than anything else. It wasn't helped this afternoon by it seeming unending - the area was all flat and wet, and you couldn't see the end of it. We got through in the end, boggy from pretty much the waist down, and made it to the last feedstation. No photos of this bit, I'm afraid - I really wasn't in the mood, and I'd got bored of taking photos of bogs!

From here, it was all road. I had hoped to see Andy when I got to Stornoway, but that obviously depended on when I finished in relation to the others, as the minibuses would be returning to our accommodation as soon as everyone was in. I'd been moving along nicely before lunch, but the bog and the navigation problems had obviously put paid to that. I was still partnered with J, who decided to help me by setting off with me at a full power walk along the road. I stayed with her for the first 3km or so, walking 8 minute kms, and then she suggested moving up to a wee jog and was off. Her idea of a wee jog was a little faster than mine, and although still moving along well I wasn't going to hold it. I got my walking poles out for the first time and stumped along, enjoying the view over Stornoway and also enjoying the fact that I was getting good mileage for the effort I was putting in. The last 14km of route was completed, mostly at a walk, in under 2 hours, which felt good to finish off.

The end of the Hebridean Way

The rest of the group wouldn't be finishing until the Butt of Lewis lighthouse tomorrow, but this was the end for me - tomorrow would be a day of sorting the logistics to get Andy back home. But I finished most of the actual Hebridean Way, having run or walked 180km in 5 days. That's the furthest I've done in a week, so I'm happy enough with that.