Overall winner Kim Collison has described the last two hours of the Montane Winter Spine Race as “a cloud nine moment”.
The British ultrarunner has an impressive list of big-race triumphs but until now the Winter Spine had eluded him.
He’d tried in each of the last three years to conquer it and showed up high on the leaderboard on more than one occasion but each time it ended with a heartbreaking DNF.
Not this time however and, despite some of the toughest conditions for a while with snow and ice followed by flooding, he set the third fastest time ever as he came home more than three hours clear of his nearest rival.
‘On top of the world’
Having set off at 8am on Sunday from Edale in the Peak District, he reached the finish in Kirk Yetholm on the English-Scottish border just before 7pm on Wednesday.
And speaking the next morning to Rachel Burden on the BBC’s 5 Live Breakfast show, when asked how he was feeling, he said: “I’m feeling really, really good, actually. I’m on top of the world for finishing the race. Obviously, I’m a bit sore and tired, but apart from that, I’m great.
“I have had a fair few hours of restless sleep – lying on sore spots is not very comfortable.”
Four years of chasing a dream
And asked how he’d been able to get to the point where he could not only finish the Spine but also win it, he explained: “I think it takes lots and lots of little bricks stacked up over a long, long time.
“And eventually you get to a point where you sort of tackle something like the Spine and you almost don’t notice each brick you put in, but eventually you get there.
“In the last two hours of the race. I was just on this sort of cloud nine moment, knowing that after four years of trying to finish this race and knowing that I was about to do it, it was just a really, really special moment of feeling delayed gratification that you just can’t describe.”
He echoed that when posting on Instagram alongside a photo of himself going under the finish arch: “The moment when 4 years of chasing a dream comes together 😀😀😀. The delayed gratification was massive and it was like I was floating on a cloud.
“Thank you @spinerace for allowing all of us to push our limits and achieve big.”
