The Montane Spine Race 

The Montane Spine Race is a fearsome ultra-run along the full 268-mile length of the Pennine Way in Britain. It is non-stop and involves some 40,000 feet of elevation and descent over what takes competitors anything from 3 ½ days to a week. Crucially the race is held in January, bringing all Britain’s unpredictable upland winter weather into play – storm-force winds, deluges of rain, snow, rivers in spate and muddy and freezing bogland.

‘The Spine’, and the Pennine Way, one of Britain’s leading hiking paths, starts in Edale in Derbyshire and runs a wiggly route north through some of England’s roughest and most beautiful terrain, including the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales National Park, the North Pennines (an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), through Kielder Forest and to Northumberland National Park. There it crosses the border into Scotland for a few miles of the Cheviot Hills. Linking these majestic, barren uplands, the course crosses farmland, so the race varies between windswept moorland in deep snow to forests and farmland, with boggy or rocky ground underfoot, which in turn can be flooded or even iced over.

The Spine course is managed through a series of five main checkpoints with race staff and several less formal assistance stations which are manned by volunteers, who have been known to be very helpful to competitors. The cut off times, however, are strict, and allow a maximum of 168 hours (one week) to finish the course. Competitors are required to have extensive experience of the outdoors and to be ‘self-sufficient.’ There is also a Spine summer race, during which the weather might be warmer, but you should not think that it is guaranteed to be much better, nor the terrain less boggy. The Spine Arctic Race will be held in Sweden, with distances of 130km or 420km.

 See more about the Spine Race. See an interview with international standard ultra-runner Debbie Martin-Consani, who ran the Spine Race in January 2020, just before lockdown.