For the sensible runner, running in the dark will often involve high-visibility clothing, a running buddy, a club night run or a combination of the three. It wouldn’t occur to many to attempt to run somewhere without street lighting. And if you have, you’ll know how utterly powerless it makes you feel.
By donning a head torch, however, that experience not only becomes much safer, but also turns from morbidly terrifying to something almost mystical. I first did it in 2011 during the Thunder Run, or TR24 as it’s known. I was the editor of a running magazine and was captaining a team of readers at the event.
The race requires teams or solo runners to complete as many laps as they can of a roughly 10km course in 24 hours. I had done two laps in daylight hours and my next was in the pitch black. Somehow, despite the stiffness having set in after 20km of running and lots of lazing about in the sun, once I was out on the trails with nothing but that beam of light to keep me company, it was a magical experience. I didn’t give my aching limbs another thought.
My time was no faster or slower than my daylight laps, but the novelty of running through a cloak of darkness was something I had never felt before, and it was exhilarating. Your senses come alive, you focus on your foot placement and become so much more aware of the sound of your footsteps and the beat of your heart. It was something I wanted another fix of and I began to seek off-road places to run at home – no mean feat when you live in Romford. But I found one.
Having lived in the area all my life, I knew Hornchurch country park from days messing about on my bike as a kid and being packed off on school holiday club outings – I fell in the river on one such visit. So I did something I dislike intensely as a runner: I got into the car to drive to the park one night, rather than just heading straight out of the door for a road run.
But once I was there, the route unfolded before me. Asphalt path turned to dirt track, farmland and wooded trail; just under six miles. I hadn’t used the park for years and had no idea of the transformation it had undergone.
I knew straight away this venue and this course had the potential to match the weekend I had spent doing TR24. I think I was halfway home when I had the name, the Spitfire Scramble – thanks to the site’s heritage as an RAF airbase – and before the sweat had dried on my head I had sketched a medal on a notepad and was hurriedly retracing my steps on walkjogrun.net to see how feasible the route was.
The only hurdles left in my way were the small facts that I had to leave my job, find some money to make this happen and learn from scratch what it takes to put an event like this together.
When the race starts on 30 August 2014 it will be more than two years since that summer evening. Two years of knowing I just had to do this. Two years of working out how, inspiring others to support me, finding experts to help me and hoping that runners who see and hear about it are as excited as I am at the prospect of an event like this in a place like this. Especially the night laps.
Mike Gratton, who won the 1983 London Marathon and now puts on races all over the world, recently told me: “The people who put the best races on are the people who race.” In creating this event, I have and will always try to view it through those people’s eyes, because running in a race myself was when this little seed was planted in my mind. In the middle of the night, on a hill in the Peak District.
Trying to make this happen is both terrifying and exciting, but the end result could be amazing. A bit like running in the dark.
• More information at spitfirescramble.co.uk.
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