The Mountains Are Calling by Jonny Muir

Author:Jonny Muir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

Moss, the Paris-Rawlik’s puppy sheepdog, was savaging a Salomon trainer in the front room. He had already destroyed a stuffed pheasant, depositing shredded white fluff about the cottage. Jasmin has shoes to spare. I counted fifteen pairs at her back door, while she had hurriedly closed another door that led to a room swamped with running paraphernalia. Half-Czech she may be, but she gave a typically British apology for the ‘state’ of the house as she showed me in.

‘There is no “typical week”,’ Jasmin explains as she attempts to describe her training. As well as running rounds in 2016, she was continuing her work towards a PhD, with her research focused on the treatment of leukaemia. As Colin Donnelly found to his cost, the unending challenge for the non-professional is to fit running into the rhythm of a complicated life. ‘It might be at nine at night or five in the morning; it might be a lunchtime at work,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t tell you my weekly mileage or ascent, and I rarely know what I intend to do in training more than a day ahead.’ She was running ‘most days’ in the build-up to the first of the rounds, before work on weekday mornings for at least an hour, plus longer runs at the weekend, typically up to four hours. ‘Always in the hills,’ she stresses. Once a week, she and Konrad went ‘somewhere pretty steep’ to attempt hill reps. A tempo run around the reservoir was another weekly fixture, with Jasmin running one way, Konrad the other. ‘Where you cross is a sign of how you’re doing,’ she says. ‘It makes it a bit more exciting. I guess that’s my speed session.’ She has no desire to be coached. ‘I run how I feel. I don’t go out thinking, I’m going to beast myself.’

Sacrifice is a word bandied about to describe the things a successful athlete must apparently forgo: family time, friends, a social life. Jasmin would not use the word. There is no sacrifice if you are living your life in the way you want. Pre-dawn hill runs in the Moorfoots, wild swims in the Gladhouse Reservoir, 20-mile bicycle commutes to work at Easter Bush. This is how she chooses to live her life. Success is merely a consequence. On top of running, she includes hiking. The trip to the Sierra Nevada was planned deliberately with the Bob Graham in mind. ‘The aim was to not meet anyone for ten days, so we were carrying all our food in a big rucksack,’ Jasmin says. There was a little running, she admits: ‘I would run at higher altitude, maybe half the days, maybe 40 minutes.’ Jasmin had earlier told the Scottish Hill Runners assembly that she did ‘a lot of walking’ in her three rounds. ‘It’s like a long hike in the hills,’ she had joked. It may be, but Jasmin is still moving faster than most.

Perhaps the lack of a television – and the mind-numbing trap it can offer – is the secret? As for what they eat, the couple’s diet is unremarkable.

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