The Time Machine

Look up into the night sky, and you look into the heart of a time machine. The light we see has travelled over millennia, only to reach us as a flickering dot on the blanket of dark. When that light left the stars those photons called home, dinosaurs were winning the evolutionary race on the continentally unrecognisable Earth. Running was what the long since extinct creatures of the planet did to avoid being munched by the stars of Jurassic World. Those creatures may or may not have recognised the significance of the night sky they saw every night.

Fast forward at least 65 million years, and very few people in the UK have ever seen skies as dark as those dinosaurs. Light pollution is something we live with, but if you ever get to somewhere really dark, like Kielder, a designated Dark Sky location, what you will see on a clear night is an emotionally charged experience. The sky looks like someone has planted light bulbs in a sea of candy floss. And my kids cannot get enough of looking at it.

Kielder had been part of our family since our first family holiday there, before I was a runner. And it was the energy of that precious family time that had made me determined to complete my first ever marathon there, four years earlier. The thing is, Kielder is very, very hilly. It had been hard enough gasping behind a pushchair containing a small child for a mile or to. Running twenty-six of them was brutal. But I vowed to do it again.

So the moment I saw the advert for the Kielder Dark Skies Marathon, in which the runners wear head torches and run in the dark, I knew I was going to do it. The race was organised by a company called Trail Outlaws, and in my head, Professor Brian Cox was narrating the entry form. I was going to run under an expanding universe. The light from our nearest star outside the Solar System would have left around the time of our holiday. I would be there to race the starlight we had seen on those nights, those years ago, to the finish line.

The thought of returning to the base of our first family holiday, to run under a time machine, over-ruled any possibility that the weather might be cloudy. Or rainy. Or windy. Or cold. Or all of the above. Garry and Tim from Trail Outlaws had patiently answered my e-mails about survival blankets; I had bought a family bag of Jelly Babies; I had shrugged off a niggle. But as Scott, my Iron Man triathlete neighbour, and I arrived at the start, it was obvious that we were not going to see the stars. It was tipping it down.

We had agreed to run at a fairly steady pace. This was a race to savour, and build endurance for later in the year. Scott travels light in races. He was the only runner I could see who didn’t wear a waterproof running jacket. We met Greg, another Iron Man triathlete, at the start. Greg was wearing his waterproof jacket and running bottoms. He didn’t look very warm.

“What are you wearing for the race?” enquired Scott.

“This lot!” shivered Greg. “It’s cold and it’s only getting colder!”

Greg is a fast runner. If the cold was going to get to him, it was going to get to me. I removed my track bottoms, but took them with me in case I needed them later. My grandma would have approved of the idea that I could ‘feel the benefit’ later on. But she wouldn’t have approved of the idea of a hilly marathon in the cold, wind and rain. She would have stayed in. And no-one would have blamed her.

I wore just about every piece of emergency kit I had taken.

The first ten miles or so epitomised the harsh beauty of trail running. The trail was well signposted, and the mood optimistic, despite the character building weather. The checkpoints were stocked with sweets, flapjack and Jaffa Cakes. I have never fuelled so well on a run. The marshals were heartily supportive, despite almost certainly being colder than the runners. I really hope there were some sweets left for them.

After an hour and a half, I started to feel a bit gloomy for no reason. But our head torches began to replace the murky grey as our source of light, and I started to feel better. As soon as I saw the dam in the distance, marking sixteen miles, I felt quite elated. Crossing the dam was like running into a car wash that had been foolishly built in a wind tunnel. Yet that elation never really went away, even at twenty miles when the steepest of the hills burned away at tired calf muscles.

The final checkpoint, two miles before the finish, saw one more handful of jelly beans, and another step towards tooth decay. Nothing, other than perhaps taking a wrong turning two hundred metres from the finish, could stop us now. And who would manage to do that?

Two hundred metres from the line, Scott and I took a wrong turning. We headed into the car park, suspicious of the absence of anyone other than a runner who had clearly finished. We back tracked, suddenly noticing the line of light bulbs guiding us to the finish. Oops.

As we checked in to the finish, the runners who were already getting into warm, dry clothes, applauded. This happened for every runner. The friendly and genuinely celebratory atmosphere of a bunch of runners and their few supporters, who knew what their fellow runners had been through and accomplished, was a high point among a race full of high points.

Scott asked if I fancied some chips on the way home. Being athletes, we both had curry sauce.

The next day, wearing my Dark Skies running top that all finishers received, Lizzie gave me a paper bag I had noticed the night before as I devoured my chips. She had made me a goody bag. These are given out at the biggest races. My home made bag contained a cereal bar and a certificate she had designed just for me. Being a happy runner and dad, one quick camera-phone later, and the whole world could see my certificate on Facebook.

But the exhilarating journey of the Dark Skies Marathon didn’t end there. Garry from Trail Outlaws saw the post, and to Lizzie’s delight, kindly sent her a Dark Skies top, just like Daddy’s. This generous gesture has elevated an amazing experience into a truly stellar one. So today, Lizzie and I wore matching tops on our family run. The stars on Lizzie’s top will be forever frozen in time as the moment a family holiday ran around a lake in the dark, and the wet, and the cold. Perfect.