Previous races - Rat Race The Wall 2022

The Wall 2022 - Race Report

The Wall is a Rat Race ultramarathon that takes you from Carlisle to Newcastle in a single day, loosely following the route of Hadrian’s Wall - a total of 70 miles or 112 km. The route is about 80% road (or at least tarmac) running, and 20% on the trails over the hills. It would be my second attempt at a 100km ultra, after pulling out of last year’s Race to the Castle at the 60km point.

Being a Rat Race event, it was extremely well organised and the route was very well marked. They are picky about you carrying a mandatory set of kit, which caused some checking and chasing around when packing, but that’s made pretty clear up front. On the day, it was a very well run event.

Start was at Carlisle castle at 7am. We went up the previous evening along with fellow local runner Nick and stayed over at the Travelodge. Once there, we registered and went through the mandatory kit check, which took a while, and then found a pizza together. On the day, the weather was as forecast - clear, cloud with sunny intervals, and about 15C. Compared with the heavy rain and northerly winds I’d had for my attempt at Race to the Castle the previous year, that was pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered. We joined 800 other lunatics on the green outside the castle, including a few in fancy dress - braver than me with 70 miles to go! We were counted down, and then released in batches to spread us out along the initial couple of miles of footpath.

Leg 1 was 15 miles to Lanercost Priory. The way it worked was that there were 5 main feedstations (pitstops in Rat Race speak) where you could fill up your water reservoirs in your running pack and restock on food. Between those, there were checkpoints where you could grab a cup of water and a Haribo if you needed - I made less use of those. Lanercost came up in a little under three hours of mostly road (and not vastly interesting road, to be honest), which meant I was holding a reasonable running speed and not overcooking it. I had a croissant, stocked up on water and flapjack, said hi to my supporting crew (Andy) and headed off on the next leg.

Leg 2 was just the 9 miles, again with a fair percentage of road, to Walltown, better known as the home of the excellent Roman Army Museum, where I’d spent a fair amount of time with Sam while supporting Andy doing the same event in 2015. I felt a little more connection with the actual wall now - a fair amount of this leg was running on an arrow straight road alongside it. Speed still felt OK, so I stocked up the running pack and myself and onwards we went.

Leg 3 was nominally the shortest (6 miles) but undoubtedly the most scenic - in the Northumbrian sense of the word. I’d moaned slightly to Andy at pitstop 2 about the amount of road so far, but this was straight up into the Pennines – up and down only more so. The ground was dry enough, so no problems with grip, but the ascents and descents were hard work on legs that now had 24 miles in them. There was a fair amount of walking on this leg, but the views were superb. For all that I’d never have managed 70 miles of it, this was the best bit of the route by far, leading to the youth hostel at The Sill in Once Brewed for pitstop 3. 30 miles down. It wasn’t halfway, but I was pleased with the way things had gone so far.

It was still a warm day, even though there was a fair amount of cloud, and I was going through a litre of fluids (half water, half isotonic drink) between pitstops, so I made sure that I filled up each time. Leg 4 was another long one - 14 miles of mostly road up past Vindolanda to the road along the moor. This was the interminable bit - I wished the Romans had got more than Once Brewed and had introduced some bends in the road, as it went on straight forever and you could see runners for miles in front and behind you. Spent a long time chatting to a fellow runner from Newcastle - chatting to total strangers on these events is an ultrarunner thing. Embarassingly, I never got her name.

On the route, particularly in this area, you pass a lot of groups of tourists, who regarded us with everything from enthusiastic support to total incomprehension (which is fair enough). I was just near enough to hear one loudly informing their group that “no-one could run from Carlisle to Newcastle, they must be doing it in sections”. I caught the eye of one in the group and nodded a “yes, we really are” at them. “When are you going to get there?” she asked. What I should have replied was “when do the pubs shut in Newcastle?” but I only thought of that line about 5 minutes later. I actually replied “about midnight”, which as it turned out was not one of my better predictions.

Eventually the long and not remotely winding road came to an end, and were off the road and down through the woods before coming into Hexham along the river. Andy and I have history with Hexham, and none of it good. A holiday we had there came to an end after day 1 when a back spasm made us decide that a camping holiday was really not what I needed, and a pregnant Andy had to get the tent down on her own as I couldn’t actually move. At least one other attempt to revisit it failed for a different reason. So I should have known that it would be trouble, and it was.

I do enough running to generally be OK with blisters, but this time I felt some coming, and they proved it by one bursting a couple of miles short of Hexham. I’d gone for road shoes rather than trail shoes due to the amount of road running in this event, and I’d probably left it a bit long between replacements - that and the 6-mile cross country section over the rocks in them hadn’t done my feet any favours. I knew I had a sock change waiting in my mid-way bag at Hexham in 2 miles time, so there didn’t seem to be any point in stopping before then. That last bit into Hexham was very nice - lots of support along the river from passers by.

Hexham is 44 miles into the route - just under two-thirds distance. The pitstop there is a fairly big marquee - there’s also a kit check on the way out, as there’s a good chance that unless you are a quick runner it’ll be getting dark before you get to the pitstop after that, and you need to show that you have your head torch and colder kit. I used it for a soup and a roll and a sock change - I could see more blisters coming, but without taping all of both feet I couldn’t see that I could do much. I may need to learn a bit more about this.

The next leg was the longest of all - 17 miles - and it certainly felt that way. All the Hexham feet faffing, plus the usual tanking up, took over half an hour, which was longer than it should be and was just about enough for everything to lock solid. It took about 15 minutes before I was even walking comfortably again at a decent speed, and my finish time calculations were going back and back. The blisters were worsening, and I was going to be having to walk it from there.

I always find that the 50% to 75% bit of any event is the hardest section, and that was proving very true here. You are only just past half way, and you can’t claim that you are “nearly there yet”. To try and encourage myself along, I’d borrowed Andy’s Aftershokz headphones for this reason - they are the bone conductor sort that a lot of runners use as they allow you to listen to what’s going on round you as well as hearing the music. On a previous practice event, they’d linked to my watch fine. Could I get them to work when I needed them? No chance. (For what its worth, they also worked fine when I tried them again after I got home.)  I blame Hexham. And the road was probably my least favourite bit of the route - it was fairly busy, with no pavement, and little verge. Very definitely at the “put one foot in front of the other” stage. Hexham to Corbridge was probably the low point.

There are some communities on the route that definitely use it as an annual form of entertainment, and enthusiastically support everyone going past. The drinkers outside the pubs on the route cheer you all the way, and there’s a caravan/lodge park you go through (I think just before Ovington) where they have food and drinks out and couldn’t be more welcoming. One lady did say loudly “why are you actually doing this?”, and at that point in the evening, with every step hurting, I didn’t really have a good answer for her. The slow plod (and it really was a slow plod by then) continued, through a badly overgrown and uneven field path that was exactly what my feet didn’t need at that point. A couple more runners passed me at that point, as a few had been doing as I slowed, and helpfully saved me taking my pack off to get the head torch out, as it had got to that time. Another burst of support from the pubs in Ovington, and so along the edge of the Tyne towards Newburn.

The woods in the dark were fairly surreal. What with the signage and the route on my watch, I wasn’t going to get lost, but you certainly felt alone - I was considerably slower than the runners now passing me, so they came and went with a mutual encouragement in both directions. At one point, picking up my blistered feet carefully and putting them down flat each time, I felt I was channelling Shaggy from Scooby Doo - tall, unkempt, stooping over and exactly that flat-footed gait. I hit a pothole I hadn’t seen and burst another blister, and a few words that weren’t “Jinkies” escaped that would have given any Scooby Doo episode an 18 rating. Rat Race did mile markers at 3, 2 and 1 mile from each feedstation, but the markers before Newburn must have used a different unit of measure. It seemed to take ages to get through each mile - which was because it was taking ages. I was down to about 3 miles an hour at this point.

Newburn pitstop was Rat Race’s volunteers at their best - trying to help anyone who they could, dealing with anyone whose race really had come to an end, and getting enough food into everyone left to get them through to the end. I can’t praise this group enough. I knew if I started investigating blisters I’d never get moving again, but I needed to do a battery change in my head torch, so I sat down at a picnic table for long enough at least to do that. Someone encouraged me to drink a hot chocolate, and I topped up the running pack flasks for the last time. In and out in ten minutes, which was pretty much what it needed to be. Nine miles to go in the dark.

Fortunately, just when I needed it, the route was helpful - it was mostly a tarmac path on or near the river. We followed the Scotswood road for a while, which I knew because it features in the song “Blaydon Races” which I knew from my childhood. Nothing was further from my mind than races at that point - it was really just one foot in front of another for myself and the other wallers at that point, all of whom were trying to keep each other going. There was starting to be a sense that there were only a few miles to go, and this might happen.

My problem at this point was not just the blisters, but further up. According to the physio, I have a weak thingy muscle (as my running beginners group know, I’m not good at anatomy) and the funny walking gait due to the blisters had strained it further, so the legs had nothing left. I was definitely wobbling now, and conscious that I wasn’t walking in a particularly straight line. Anything resembling up was hard work, as I simply couldn’t lift my knees up any more. I was fairly glad there was a railing along the edge of the river, otherwise the Tyne might definitely have been “all mine, all mine” with or without fog (obscure joke - google Gazza’s greatest hit). 

I was born in Newcastle, and although we moved away when I was four my memory had hung onto a few things - and one of them was the Tyne bridges. There were pictures of them in the house, and I still knew the set. It was when they started to appear that I realised I was actually nearly there. The earlier ones I didn’t know so well - two had been built since I moved away - but the High Level bridge, the swing bridge and the iconic Tyne bridge were a wonderful site. The bridge at the end of the route was the new millenium footbridge - inevitably the last one in the direction I was going - and Sam and I had watched Andy come over that to finish back in 2015. This time was my turn. Normally, you at least break into a trot when you come up to the finish line, but that wasn’t going to happen - I climbed the north face of the bridge, whose normally minimal incline seemed hugely steep at that time, and plodded down the other side to the finish line and the support of the wonderful Rat Race volunteers (including Andy, who’d been working a volunteer stint that was intended to end at midnight and actually ended at 3:30am when I arrived).

So - thanks first to the Wall team and volunteers, who made the event happen and helped so many people back onto their feet that night. Thanks to the other entrants - I won’t say competitors, as there was no real sense of competition, just everyone trying to help every else to get to the finish. Thanks to running club and gym friends for all their encouragement. Thanks to Tony, Helen and Michelle, with me the Castle four from last year, for helping me deal with the disappointment of the DNF. And thanks to Andy, for support before, patching me up after, and the back end of a 12 hour volunteer shift in the middle somewhere. Its a great event - I’m just glad its Andy and not me doing it next year!

(note that a couple of these photos were actually taken the following year when I was supporting Andy doing the same event - I have very few photos of the second half of the my own event)