His Heart's In The High Land

He was 32 years old when he started serious fell running. He carried no credentials with him. There had been no organized athletics in his school, which he left at 15. To this day he has never run a flat race, much less a marathon. But by June 1970 he had set the first of the 12 records he now holds, running the four 3,000-feet-plus Lake District peaks in eight hours and 20 minutes.

There are clearly two factors that have gone into the making of Joss Naylor. One is a searing determination that shows itself physically in his dark, intense cast of feature and the harshness of effort he puts into a farm task like clipping a sheep. The other is the place where he has spent all his life.

There are two Lake Districts. One is the green, idyllically beautiful country of Wordsworth's Rydal Water and Dove Cottage, gentle lakes like Grasmere and pretty stone villages where you buy gingerbread and Kendal mintcake to take home and from where you can look up at the picturesque mountains. Sometimes, though, the reality breaks through. The mist and cold on the hilltops, even in high summer, kill 10 tourists a year. Although most of the peaks are under 3,000 feet, they come straight up from sea level. It is this second Lake District which raised Naylor. His little farmhouse, huddled under the shadow of Yewbarrow Fell, looks across the black glacial depths of Wast Water Lake to an immense gray cliff of loose shale—the scree. He was born on his father's farm, at the head of the lake, and moved the six miles to Bowerdale when he married. His mother, he'll tell you with clear pride, was a Wilson of Wasdale, the oldest family in these parts. He does not talk much about his father, except to say that he gave him no encouragement.

The most recent of his feats, perhaps the one of which he is proudest, is setting a new record for the classic " Lakeland 24 Hours." In 1864, the Reverend J. M. Elliott managed four of the mountains in 8� hours, and through the remainder of the century others improved on his feat in an unregulated way. The "24 Hours" really took its shape in 1903, when Dr. A. W. Wakefield, a notable fell runner, declared that the aim must be to conquer "the greatest possible number of peaks above 2,000 feet and to return to the starting point within 24 hours." A record established in 1932 by a legendary fell runner called Bob Graham (42 peaks; height ascended 27,000 feet; time 23 hours, 39 minutes) lasted until 1960, but between that date and 1965 the record was gradually pushed up to 60 peaks. In 1971, Joss Naylor made it 61. The margin, though, was too narrow for a man like Naylor, even though he raised it to 63 in 1972. He was determined to set such a new level of achievement that it could scarcely be challenged in his own time, and just after 7 a.m. on June 22 of this year he started out at the base of Skiddaw Mountain, near Keswick.

"That section was the worst," he recalls. "All heather and long grass. That heather in peaty ground, there's holes in it and you keep dropping into them. There's a lot of snow on it in winter, and no sheep, so the grass doesn't get eaten. I deliberately did that section first to get it off my mind. If you come on that sort of stuff when you've got 40 to 50 miles on your legs, you take it badly, mentally like. It was better when we came on the Helvellyn section: it's walked by tourists so there's footpaths. It was very hot, though, and I got to the first checkpoint a half hour before I should have, so the pace-makers hadn't got organized, they had no liquid for me. I was dehydrated and I got cramp for a while, but after I was able to drink, they passed off. The cramped muscles were still sore but they lasted out."

He ran on through the day, saving his legs as much as he could on the descents. "In a way," he says, "it's worse on a steep descent because your legs can't fully relax, you keep putting tension on them. You have to reduce this as much as you can to give yourself a good start on the climbs, like the one I had on Scafell when I had to cover rocks and loose scree. The worst stuff of all is that blueberry wire; it grows about a foot high. I was on bracken for the first 1,500 feet, then this stuff was on the last 1,000 feet. It was terrible hard work and it was beginning to get dark."

He ran on through the darkness, which he describes as difficult, not because of the obvious dangers but, once again, because of the tension it puts on the legs. His pace-makers shone flashlights, but the moon was full, he says, and the double shadows gave him trouble. "One was fighting the other, like," he says. Once dawn broke he got his rhythm back. "It was a most beautiful sunrise," he remembers. "We were just going off under Causey Pike, that's the farthest-out peak on the Grasmore range—it's about a mile out on a limb, that peak. It looks such a waste of effort, you know. You have to get to it, it's separate from all the others and you've got so many miles on your legs. It's these sort of things that break a man."

Nothing has broken Naylor so far. Inside the 24 hours he covered 108 miles and climbed 40,000 feet, or thereabouts. The precise decimal points have still to be worked out. But, undeniably, he reached 72 summits in 23 hours, 11 minutes. After two days' rest, he started shearing.

For all his intense dedication, Joss Naylor remains a 19th-century amateur in attitude. There are professional fell runs, but he has never taken part. "Wherever money comes in," he says, "there's always roguing. I live without a lot of money and I don't want any out of my sport." Friends organized a subscription to send him to Colorado; to start with, at least, he'll stay with Mike Fenerty, the brother of a friend of his from Liverpool, who has settled in Boulder. "I'm going to the States on my own," he says. "The altitude will be a lot against me, but I've a couple of weeks to adjust. After I've been in Boulder I'm hoping to get a bit nearer to Pikes Peak and jog up it a couple of times. I'll be better off training out there, anyway. Here I've got all this farm work staring me in the face, making me feel guilty.... Mike Fenerty wrote me this morning that there was a bunch of good lads in the race, easy to get on with. If it wasn't for the altitude, I'd like the race to be longer. Anyway, I've got two weeks to put it together.

"I hope the going is rough, "he adds. "I like a bit of rock. Before I started running, I used to go out on a Sunday with my climbing rope, around the crags on Red Pike and Ennerdale, looking for sheep in trouble...." A sheep that just thinks it's in trouble, clasped over his knees for shearing, tries to wriggle free. "No you don't, my beauty," says Naylor. "I've no time to be chasing you."