MOUNTAIN RUNNING:RUNNING DOWNHILL is one of the most childlike things you can do. With your arms out like a fighter-jet, and straining to hold your speed, you're always on the verge of losing control. For a child, that sense of near-dread is exhilarating; for an adult, it's kind of nerve-racking.
It’s not for everyone, but it is for the 1,200 or so Irish people who compete on the country’s mountain running circuit.
This Sunday, 60 to 80 hardy souls will race up and down Carrauntoohil in Co Kerry. It is, of course, the country’s highest peak, and the most difficult of the 50-plus events on the Irish Mountain Running Association’s calendar of races. It is one of five point-scoring races which contribute towards the Irish championships. The Croagh Patrick leg, one of the other four, has already been run over the May Bank Holiday weekend.
Not many will have registered the race’s results. Mountain running is in the foothills of the nation’s sporting consciousness. Its popularity in Ireland is growing steadily, though. Twenty years ago, there were only a couple of hundred people who competed annually. In 1999, this number had grown to about 400, but in the last decade the numbers have ballooned to over a thousand, aged from about 17 up to 70.
People are attracted for a variety of reasons. The Irish Mountain Running Association notes that its members are drawn from backgrounds such as mountain-biking, triathlon and Athletics Ireland clubs. Also, the number of people marathon running has mushroomed over the last decade and hill running provides useful ancillary training. People are running later in their lives, too.
A top athlete such as 26-year-old Brian MacMahon from Cork – who finished 17th in last October’s Dublin City Marathon – can, for instance, look forward to a long mountain- running career. “On the track, it might be 25 to 30 when you’d peak,” he says, “but in endurance events like the marathon, hill-running, half-marathons, over years, you build up endurance from training, from years of logging mileage. I think that maybe when I’m 35 I might be running at my best in mountain-running terms.”
To the uninitiated, it’s difficult to understand the appeal of such a gruelling, hair-raising pursuit. The Carrauntoohil race, for example, measures about 14 kilometres. Normally a top road runner would do 10 kilometres in about half an hour. Last year, it took John Lenihan, the Carrauntoohil race winner, 81 minutes to cover the course.
Lenihan, a part-time dairy farmer from the Stacks Mountains region in Kerry, who won the World Mountain Running Trophy in 1991, has won the Carrauntoohil race a staggering 18 times. He will be 50 next year.
It doesn’t necessarily translate that a good track athlete or road runner will be as effective once he or she takes to the hills. “Mountain running is not something that all top road runners can adjust to,” explains Lenihan. “It’s a different event. We’ve had some great international runners like John Downes and Noel Berkeley turning to mountain running, and others, but not all of them can adjust to it.
“John Downes was probably a particular example. I remember John turning out in Wicklow for an event when he was national cross-country champion and tearing off at the start.
“The race was a selection for the Irish team for the World Championships. He didn’t even make the team at the end.
“I remember he wrote a very nice article – I still have it somewhere in my scrapbook – and he was full of admiration for the mountain runners after that. He said, ‘I woke up the next morning and I felt as if somebody had poured concrete up my arse’. He wasn’t one of these people that went away and said, ‘Ah, that’s for the birds’. He really admired what mountain running was about after that.”
Sometimes the terrain can consist of ruggedly-hewn footpaths, which disappear towards the summit into a mass of fern and soggy marsh, with big, jagged rocks protruding randomly, or else the way forward will be made up of scree, each loose rock being the size of a rugby ball. There are stages in a race that have to be taken on all fours. Often, competitors say, it’s a question of who’s the fastest walker.
What you register most acutely watching a pack of runners snake their way up a mountain is the audible sound of wheezing and the hunched frames as they scamper forward.
If you continue to follow them, what hits you is that mountains are deceptive. They tend to go on and on remorselessly. It takes a particular mental strength to persevere.
Then there’s the weather. On a bad day, or towards the top of a mountain, you can expect to be whipped by driving rain and sleet. “I’ve been up there,” admits Lenihan, “and you see big chunks of ice coming flying off the rocks with the wind at you.”
There are compensations, however, especially those Wordsworthian views.
“You can also be out in the most beautiful of days as well,” says Lenihan. “There is nothing to give you an adrenaline buzz like running along a ridge on a fine summer’s day and the smell of heather. There is nothing in the world to give you an adrenaline buzz like that – turning at the top and heading back down the mountains.”
Descending, leaping downhill like a goat, regularly having to navigate sharp drops of 10 or 15 feet, comes to some easier than others. “It’s not often you have someone that’s very good at going up and coming down,” says Gerry Brady, high performance officer of the Irish Mountain Running Association.
“That makes the race interesting because it can change – the leader on the way up might be caught by the pack on the way down. So he’s trying to get away as much as he can on the climb and they’re trying to keep him within sight and then get him on the way down.
“What somebody told me is that you don’t look down you look 10 feet in front of you because that’s where your next step is going to be,” says Mags Grennan, aged 51, who only came to the glories of the sport two years ago, but in that time she has picked up veteran titles at both the European and World mountain running championships.
“It’s a bit like skiing,” she adds. “If you feel like you’re getting a bit out of control, you move on. You don’t try and brake. If you try and brake it’s more dangerous because you’re slipping on that peg. If the ground’s uneven, you should be moving off it. Now downhill wouldn’t come natural to me – I’m having to learn. I would have been screaming coming down at first. There are some who are natural at it.”
In Richard Askwith’s enchanting book about mountain running Feet in the Clouds, which was published in 2004 and sold over 25,000 copies, he quotes Oscar Wilde in trying to explain the charm of the sport: “It seems to me that we all look at nature too much and live with her too little.”
Nature, or a mountain, needs to be interacted with to properly experience it sometimes. There is something primal and invigorating, he argues, in scampering up and down a mountain, in the need to brace oneself against the elements, the cold and the wet, to weather blisters and bruises, and to possibly even get lost, either physically or in one’s thoughts.
And afterwards, as you watch hill runners – having bathed their sore feet and burning muscles in a mountain stream – huddle in a car park around flasks of tea and homemade biscuits, you also get a sense that it’s one sport in which, surely, the great pleasure is that it’s over.
Until the next mountain.
A history of mountain running
THE FIRST recorded mention of mountain running, or fell running as it is known in Britain, goes back to the middle of the 11th century. In Scotland, King Malcolm Canmore organised a race in Braemar, allegedly to find a swift messenger.
Early mountain races, which became popular in the 19th century, were almost all professional, in that cash prizes were awarded to the winners.
The first mountain races began in Ireland in the early 1980s, partly born out of the orienteering community who began running up and down hills to increase their fitness for orienteering races.
The first Carrauntoohil race was run in 1987.
A race will be run along an established sequence of checkpoints, with the option to run off-trail within these parameters. Each athlete has to observe the usual safety measures in tackling a mountain, which includes the carrying of a map, compass, whistle, a supply of food and appropriate wet gear.
In an international race, for example, men will run 12 kilometres and women eight kilometres. For under-19s racing, boys also cover eight kilometres and girls, four kilometres.
This September the World Mountain Running Association Championship will be held at Madesimo, Italy. In Beijing in 2008, the international athletics body sanctioned it as a world championship; for the previous 24 years it had been billed as a World Trophy. The race alternates each year between being either uphill-only or an uphill-and-downhill race.
Italy is acknowledged as being the strongest country for throwing up top mountain runners at present; although the king of the sport is undoubtedly the New Zealander, Jonathan Wyatt. Aged 37, he is a six-time world champion.
It is hoped that mountain running will become an Olympic event by 2016 or 2020.
