Rat Race Run Britannia - Week 5, day 3 - Lubfearn to Lairg

The lonely glen

Distance: 61.29km (total so far 1353.8km)
Total climb: 678m (total so far 24,472m)
Steps: 67,265 (total so far 1,606,454)

Our first job was to return to the layby in the middle of nowhere where we had finished the previous day - a still slightly surreal place to start the day. We were given several pieces of information to set off with, none of them particularly reassuring.

The first was that this was another 60km day - the first of two in this week. The second was that due to the total lack of roads in this part of the Highlands, we would need to complete 22km before the first ("elevenses") feedstation.

And the final gem, which our leaders only found out about the previous evening, showed once again that the road system across the rest of the country which we take for granted simply doesn't exist up here in the Highlands. The road that led from Lairg where we finished to the location of our accommodation that night was closing at 7pm for all-night resurfacing. The only alternate route would add an hour onto what was already an hour's journey - there simply weren't any other roads. So while they were quite prepared to wait and help anyone who wanted to finish, anyone who didn't make it into Lairg by 6:15 wasn't going to make the accommodation until well after 8pm. No pressure!

So we set off with somewhat of a load on our minds. However, the first part of the day was enough to lift that load for a good while.

The route from our layby was not along the road but straight up into another Scottish valley, or glen. It was stunning.

It wasn't raining, but there was enough moisture in the air (no surprise there) to just add a soft focus to the hills either side. The colouring was purple and green. The first part of the glen was alongside a narrow loch - Loch Vaich. The track we followed was a good surface, which not only spared our feet but also allowed us to keep looking around. The photos really don't do it justice, although we both tried.

At the end of the loch, we kept going north and headed up between two hills following a beck that fed the loch. Once over the watershed, we picked up Gleanne Mor and followed that for the next few km.

There were very few buildings all morning - the place is fantastically isolated - but we did spot one just at the top of Gleann Mor. It would take a special sort of person to handle living in somewhere this remote. Conversely, it would probably be a good location for a bagpipe school, as the chances of complaints from neighbours would be significantly reduced!

I learnt later that this was an important area for wildlife, and there was a photographer some of the others talked to who had identified a golden eagle nest in the hills above the path and was trying, with the aid of a  very large lens, to get some photos from an appropriate distance away.

We finally came back into a less remote area, and came down the river into a more forested area. And our first feedstation, which we were more than ready for - I'd run out of cereal bars and had actually managed to drink most of my water, which was good.

There was only a 6km jump from there to the lunch stop, most of which was along the roads of the Glencalvie estate - there was actually some building going on, which looked like a small development of holiday lodges. I made a good lunch at the feedstation, and then set off on the second part of the day, with 33km of the day still to go.

The afternoon was a very different experience - the next 20km were on a very minor road, on which I saw a car about every half hour. It wasn't an unpleasant road, but compared with the morning there wasn't a lot to look at. I therefore decided to break out my headphones for the first time.

I have a pair of bone conductor headphones, which fit behind and not over the ears and therefore are used a lot by runners as you can hear what is going on around you as well as the music. These take a music feed from my Garmin watch, which is convenient. I don't actually use them much, as I generally am happy to take in the sounds around me, but I thought it might help the long road this afternoon.

But they didn't work. The music I downloaded to them before I left had an expiry date (standard mechanism to do with music rights on downloaded music) and while that had never worried me before, I hadn't done an event this long before. All the music I had downloaded to my watch had expired. Tarnation.

OK, Martin, you're supposed to be good at this IT stuff. OK, so to resync the expiry dates, I need to get the watch onto a wifi signal. In the Scottish Highlands. OK, so I can hotspot my phone. Or I could if the phone had a signal either. The sheep carrying the local 5G antenna had obviously moved.

Miraculously, several km later, a signal popped up on the phone. I have no idea why - there was no-one obviously around to use it - but I wasn't complaining. OK, hostspot the phone, switch wifi on on the watch, connect the two, hit the resync option...and be told that you can't sync music while "an activity is in progress". So, having recorded every metre of Run Britannia that I had done so far, I could either stop that and have music, or leave it running. No contest - I didn't need music that much! Still, all the tech faffing had kept me interested for a while.

The road got slowly busier as we came into a more populated area, and led us along the shores of the Kyle of Sutherland towards our next feedstation at Invershin.

Crossing the Kyle was also interesting - a bridge had been added alongside the road bridge, which was good from the point of view of staying clear of the traffic on a narrow bridge, but less good aesthetically - one assumes that the planning authority had a day off!

The road the other side of the bridge was definitely busy, but we weren't on it for long, and shortly after that we got a rest from the road as the route threw us back into forest. By then, it was a nice change, and the going was still fairly good. This was starting to become a factor - my feet were very sore by now, and the soles on my trail shoes had worn quite thin over the last few hundred km. I'd gone for road shoes, which had much more padding, for the whole day today, and it made the km go a lot faster - but I knew I'd be in trouble if we hit any sort of muddy trail. Happily, we didn't.

I walked the last few km into Lairg with Jill - Jill and Douglas were the other couple apart from Andy and myself of which both halves were doing the event. That gave me someone to chat to for the forest section, which was pleasant. We climbed up through the trees, although only a very minor hill by the standards of this event, and then back down along a minor road into Lairg - which looked by far the biggest town we'd seen for a couple of days, although still not much more than a village!

I was safely in by about 5pm, and so well ahead of the deadline - and all of us completed by 6pm, which meant we made the roadworks cutoff. All good.

Song of the day: well, since I was unable to play music when I wanted to, it seems wrong to pick one of the songs I wasn't able to listen to. So let's be corny and go for "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel - both for the quite peace of the morning glen, and for obvious reasons in the afternoon!

Last: A distillery and the NC500
Next: The Bog Day!