The King of the Fells

New York Times photo.

In early July, hundreds of “fell runners” attended the funeral of Joss Naylor, running eight miles up the valley from his home in Cumbria, England in his honour. Naylor, their quiet king, had died at age 88.

Fells are what the Britons call hills and small mountains. Hoofing up and down them is another level of fatiguing, even for endurance runners. The races are often epic Big Days. The most famous race is the Bob Graham Round: 106-km across the craggy Lake District. You have to finish in under 24 hours. If you follow the route of its namesake, there are 42 peaks in your way. The elevation gain is roughly the same as climbing Everest from sea level. Joss won it three times. On each attempt, he squeezed in a few more summits for good measure, until he maxxed out at 72. He seemed somehow to have become a better and stronger runner in his eighties than in his twenties when he took up the sport.

His whole life Joss suffered chronic back injuries set in motion when his mother kicked him in the arse at age nine after “I was giving her cheek,” the New York Times reported. There followed back surgeries, knee surgeries. One time he was kicked by a cow in a race he was leading, which bumped him back to second place. He eventually lost all ten of his toenails. Pain is glue: that’s the only plausible explanation for how his body did not completely come apart.

For Joss, the logistics of competing in these long races were tricky. He was a shepherd. Going away to race meant making arrangements for his flock. “You can’t get anyone to look after sheep these days,” he observed.

“He never won an Olympic medal, or earned a penny from his sporting achievements, or did anything much in the public gaze,” wrote Runner’s World in its obituary. “His greatness was realized in wild, remote places.”

This strikes me as the true Big Day spirit. Whatever it is you’re tackling, you’re not doing it so you can boast about it, blog about it or really score any social points at all. You’re doing it because something is pulling you from the inside out.

It reminds me of what the writer Jeff Greenwald once said about travel: We go where we need to go. And then we try to figure out what we’re doing there.