23 miles of mud, ice & a near death experience !

I was off on Monday 16 February so I decided to try and get a run in now that the snow was shifting. Loch Ordie near Dunkeld is the nearest place for me to get a decent off road run so I planned a route (see below) and headed off there.

The first 3.5 miles were all uphill and as I gained height the paths got icier. It wasn’t cold but there had been a lot of snow last week and it was melting quickly but the snow that had been compressed on the tracks and paths was very slippy, and those that didn’t have ice in them were running with streams of snow melt. My feat got very wet very quickly.

The optimistically entitled "Laird's House with Loch Benachally in the background - I don't think he lives there anymore !

After around 8 miles, following a huge leap over a burn in spate, I found myself on a very narrow path that was full of soft wet snow which went well up my calves. This went on for around 4 miles and my feet got soaked, becoming very cold.

Typical underfoot conditions

As I neared Loch Oisinneach the path became very muddy. I’ve walked in the Scottish hills for 20 years and am pretty adept at picking my way through bogs and assessing if a patch of ground will support me. At a particularly muddy stretch I launched for a tuft of grass thinking it would support me, the next thing I knew I was up to the top of my legs in an ice-cold peat bog. I couldn’t get my legs out as they were being sucked in by the soft peat my hands were just sinking in too.

I was getting cold quickly, couldn’t get my legs out and the nearest thing for me to grab, that wasn’t mud was over 6 feet away. This was the most distant part of my run, my mobile phone didn’t work there as I’d tried a couple of minutes before to make a call, and going by the lack of footprints in the snow there hadn’t been anyone along for a number of days. This was getting potentially serious, I was completely stuck and sinking.

I wriggled out of my new rucksack which was only on it’s second outing and managed to use it to bare my weight which let me kind of swim across the mud until I could grab some heather and pull myself out. The whole episode probably only took no more that 2 minutes but it felt like an eternity…

Lifesaver - My nice new rucksack after my "incident"

Thankfully my shoes stayed on and I got running as quickly as I could to generate some heat. After another couple of miles I came out the snow and the running became much easier, the 5 miles through the snow had slowed me up a lot.

The rest of the run was pretty uneventful, my knee seems to be holding up but the right hamstring gets tight after a while. I arrived back at the car in 4 hours 6 minutes.