Early on Sunday morning, as the Lake District began to buzz with hikers walking in the glorious sunshine, Kílian Jornet took the first step towards another remarkable record.
The Catalan, who last year climbed Everest twice in a week, and can run up and down Mount Blanc in under five hours, is one of the best known athletes in the fast-growing world of adventure sports. He had his sights on tackling the Bob Graham round, a challenge that involves running a 66-mile circuit of the Lake District, climbing and descending 42 of its highest peaks, in 24 hours.
Only 100 hardy souls attempt it each year, and barely a third finish. Jornet, though, flew around and smashed the fastest known time for the route, which has stood for 36 years, by more than an hour. He reached the finish at Moot Hall in Keswick in an astonishing 12 hours and 52 minutes.
“I knew I needed to suffer,” Jornet told the Guardian. “But it was a beautiful suffering.”
The 30-year-old, who is 5ft 6in tall and weighs barely nine stone, started racing up and down the mountains in Catalonia as a three-year-old, and has been an ultrarunning star for a decade. But he conceded that the Bob Graham Challenge was among the toughest of his career.
“In terms of running it’s very hard, because it’s long – 100km or more – and the elevation is huge. The downhills are very steep too so the legs get very tired and it’s always technical as well.”
It did not help either that the temperatures in the Lake District were pushing high into the 20 degrees centigrade. He laughed when asked whether there was one particularly hard moment. “It was more the last four hours” he said. “It was very hot and I kind of hit the wall on Grey Knotts. I knew I just needed to suffer and just keep going. One more step. One more step. That’s where it got hard.”
Jornet fuelled himself with energy gels, fruit, crisps and water. “There were some rivers in the mountains where I could refill a bottle,” he said, “and people gave me water”, but the biggest help he received was from other runners. There are no official route markings or aid stations on the fells; instead, runners rely on the community to help them navigate and finish.
One of the rules of the Bob Graham round club is that you must be accompanied to the top of each fell – and to run a fast time, you also need people who know the route inside out.
Luckily, Jornet was embraced by the community, and accompanied by some of the fastest and most knowledgeable runners in the Lake District. “That’s something that’s a big part of the round,” he emphasised. “It’s thanks to all these people that I was able to finish it. It was really nice that the person that organised all the logistics was Martin Stone [who was part of the road crew when the previous record holder Billy Bland did it in 1982].
“What made it even more special was that one of my pacers was the son of one of Billy’s pacers – and Billy was there, too. For me, it was so cool to be there with them: they know every stone of the road, of the mountain, and I learnt a lot during the run.”
Another tradition is that those who have joined the exclusive club of finishers – there are 2,000 members from the event’s 86-year history – then come back to help other runners having a crack at it. Jornet, though, who has big name sponsors, has a host of races in his schedule. Will he do the same? “Yes! For sure!” he said. “I have some friends who want to do it and I think some of the guys who were pacing me, they have in their legs a very fast time. So I hope that they try soon – and that they can go faster than me.”