2024 Spine race. After the Spine is over.
The 2024 Spine Race race has received tremendous coverage in various media channels. The SPINE RACE WEBSITE and its social media channels have provided excellent coverage. The modern pastime of dot-watching is now firmly entrenched in Most Trail and off-road runners’ mindsets, and the Winter Spine Race dot-watching phenomena seem above all to capture their imagination.
Dot watching
The Montane Winter Spine race has become a firm annual dot-watching favourite.
Why is that? Two principal reasons. Firstly, the very organised media team at the event have made it accessible to follow.
Secondly, the sheer immensity of the race, over a week, makes it possible to dip in and out of it daily. Most dot-watching can be accomplished over a weekend, where a relatively short 50-miler or 100 km race is over in a day. Some longer 100-mile races stretch into two days.
The Winter Spine takes the absolute biscuit in allowing for seven days of uninterrupted binge dot watching if one has the resilience for that/
Feelings of guilt that you shouldn’t be having a sneaky peak at how the runners are getting on when you really should be working, or how whole evenings are spent “dot watching “ while you keep telling yourself, ”I will go out for my run ..in a minute!”
There is a fascination with watching dots move along a map of the Pennine Way. Place names on a map, of villages you have never visited that have now become etched in your subconscious forever.
Studying contour lines on the Ordnance Survey map while those dots keep bobbing along. Trying to picture in your mind’s eye the rolling nature of the terrain or steep climbs up to wonderfully named places, some in remote locations like Malham Tarn, Pen-y Ghent, High Cup Nick or Cross Fell
Watching in tandem with the daily race videos to enhance the nature of the terrain and see in technicolour the sheets of ice that cover the trail.
Hearing the tales of the spine runners as a microphone is thrust before them to elicit real-time emotions of the wonderful, or tortuous journey they are experiencing.
This year, the words tough, hard, snow and bitterly cold feature often from heavily hooded competitors who have all looked pretty frozen!
The main race along the full 268 miles of the Pennine Way is from Edale in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders. It often overshadows the fact that there are three other events taking place during the week,
The spine extravaganza actually has four different events.
- The Spine Sprint. Which is a short 46-mile effort from the southern start in Edale to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire.
- The Spine Challenger North involves 160 miles on the northern part of the trail from Hardraw in North Yorkshire to the northern finish at Kirk Yetholm.
- The Spine Challenger South covers 108 miles from the start in Edale in Derbyshire to Hawes in North Yorkshire,
- Both the challenger events incorporate a competition for Mountain Rescue Teams (MRT) members to race each other.
- Then, there is the Full Winter Spine race.
Highlights of 2024
At the sharp end.
In short, the record book and the all time fastest spine times were re written with 5 of the top ten times being recorded in 2024.
The excellence of Jack Scott. Jack must still be absorbing his run of a lifetime as he ponders how he came to break Jasmin Paris’s race record by over 10 hours.
Damian Hall will be reflecting on breaking the previous record, improving his previous best Spine race time by nearly two hours, but finishing second, several hours behind Jack.
Konrad Rawlik, having his own adventure and reinforcing his credentials as a formidable competitor in multi-day challenges, to match those of his wife, and join a small group of husband and wife Spine finishers.
Not forgetting Doug Zinis, After two previous podiums, 2nd in 2022 and 3rd in 2023
He improved his 2023 performance by over 8 Hours and still finished 4th.
Eoin Keith, a three-time former winner, certainly enjoys the event. He finished 6th to record his 6th Winter Spine race, equalling Stephen Brown’s record.
You can read a short report I wrote on the early finishers for the Athletics Weekly Website HERE
For the women
Claire Bannwarth joined Carol Morgan (2017 and 2018) as the second woman to successfully defend her title while improving her time by five and a half hours.
Her already incredibly impressive competitive CV adds another remarkable performance.
In 2023 alone, she completed over 20 races involving a minimum of 100 miles and was on the podium in most of them.
Hannah Rickman repeated her second-place finish, and Lucy Gossage, in her winter Spine debut, took third. Further down the field, it was good to see the legend that is Nicky Spinks, and Sharon Gayter, former Lands End to John Groats record holder and GB 24 hour and 100km international, finishing the spine and showing age is never the barrier.
For the compulsive stat geeks You can view the complete Year on Year Spine race results 2012-2023
Complete all-time fastest Montane Winter Spine Race results
In truth, everyone has a story to tell. That is the nature of all multi-day events, especially this winter epic. Making the start line is the first victory, and then having to “deal with and manage yourself “ for several days, outwardly and inwardly, while also dealing with all that Mother Nature throws at you day and night. There will be stories to last a lifetime, created in a few days.
Many stories have been told already, by the Spine race videos and daily updates.
If you haven’t seen the race’s daily videos check them out HERE
Jody Manning and David Milton, exemplify the longevity of the challenge, bringing down the curtain on the 2024 race.
Jody’s time was 159 hours, 45 minutes, 11 seconds or 6 days, 15 hours, 45 minutes and 11 seconds.
David’s time of 166 Hours, 21 minutes and 48 seconds days or 6 days, 22 hours, 21 minutes and 48 seconds after leaving Edale, was Just 1 hour 18 minutes and 12 seconds inside the 7-day 168-hour cut-off. Some would argue that it is harder taking that long, almost four days longer than Jack Scott’s winning time.
In all, there were 92 finishers, 76 Men and 16 Women, with 73 DNFs, 56 Men and 17 women (TBC).
There were 165 starters, which is approximately a 55% finisher rate. Put another way, for any potential future spine racers, should you cross the first hurdle and get to the start line, on this year’s evidence, you have roughly a 50/50 chance of completing the event.
In the other events of the week,
There were impressive new course records from Joe O’Leary and Nikki Arthur in the Spine Challenger North with 44:37:20 and 52:17:19, respectively.
Daniel Weller and Sam Lissauer took the victories in the Spine Challenger South, and there were new course records for Rupert Allison (7:28:09) and Jessica Johnson(10:04:42) in the Spine Sprint.
The achievement of completing the shorter events is no mean feat in its own right but somehow dwarfed by the enormity of the full 268 miles in one go.
What Motivates these people?
All multi-day events, whether that be the Dragons Back down the length of Wales, Cape Wrath ultra through the remote North West of Scotland, the Marathon des Sables or the extreme Sri Chinmoy 3100 mile race around the block in New York, draw people to them with a spirit of adventure.
For some, it is a simple n excuse to get out of the city and the office for a week and have some fine fresh air. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, and not many would argue against it.
For others, there is a deeper quest to discover more about themselves and what they are capable of. Can they make what may have seemed totally impossible a few years ago, not just possible but almost inevitable?
People have always sought after adventures. Our school days were filled with tales that had us lying awake at night dreaming of the adventures of the first person to summit Everest, or reach the South or North Pole and how Columbus “Discovered America”!
Dreams of adventures we would like to undertake when we were grown up!
To paraphrase the immortal Star Trek quote, people have always striven “To Boldy Go, Where no Man, or woman, has gone before,”
Ok, the Pennine Way is not Everest or the South Pole and is a well-worn path. Available figures indicate that each year, 3,500 people hike the whole trail in one go in easy stages, with leisurely evenings spent at convivial overnight stops. Additionally, around 150,000 people are said to hike a portion or portions of the route in segments.
However, for Winter spine participants to undertake the journey in mid-winter as a continuous effort with much of it in darkness, is pretty much guaranteed to take you out of your comfort zone at some point, if not several points along the way. Let us not forget that comfort zones, like mythical red lines in training and racing, are expandable. Sometimes, with long years of your body, figuring out the adaptation principle. Sometimes, by just taking a giant spontaneous leap of faith, almost forcing your boundaries to be pushed out further to new realms.
For many of us who choose to undertake these modern-day journeys of exploration for the masses, that is really the point, or “The Why” that propels us forward each day. Isn’t it?
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Adrian Tarit Stott.
The author is a former GB 24 hour ultra international with over 100 ultra race completions. He has also been involved organising ultra distance races for over 30 years. Still an active recreational runner, he is currently a member of UKA’s Ultra Distance Advisory Group (URAG) and part of the selection and team management for both Scottish and GB ultra teams.He is also a freelance writer, contributing articles and reports to several websites and magazines including Athletics Weekly and Irunfar.
