NEWS, VIEWS, TRENDS and ORDINARY RUNNERS doing EXTRAORDINARY THINGS
Up-and-coming ultrarunner Jack Scott overcame his gambling problem to challenge for the top spot in some of the world’s toughest races
IT SOUNDS LIKE AN ANXIETY DREAM. It’s a Wednesday evening in January, you’ve just finished running 268 miles over the icy hills of northern England and had a total of two hours and 20 minutes of sleep across three and a half days. Then someone says you need to be up early on Thursday to be coherent in front of Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty live on BBC Breakfast.
So it was for weary, moustachioed Jack Scott, who came a hard-fought second in this year’s Spine Race, and the unfathomably chipper victor, Damian Hall. The TV appearance was a nice few minutes in the mainstream for the still under-covered sport of ultrarunning, which usually involves spectators watching numbered green dots move agonisingly slowly across a map on a phone screen. However, the interviewers’ questions didn’t go much deeper than some variation on, ‘Are you both completely mad?’
Hall, an ultrarunning veteran at 47, and Scott, 28, a relative newcomer who already has a number of incredible feats to his name, both knew what they were getting into. In June, it’ll only be six years since Scott, a steel construction worker from Stone, Staffordshire, ran his first race, knocking out a 90-minute half marathon and starting to think he might be decent at this. But he quickly moved on to the big miles. In 2018, he came second in his first 100-miler, the Exodus in the Brecon Beacons. In 2020, he beat a 32-yearold record set by Mike Hartley for running Scotland’s Southern Upland Way, completing the 214-mile route in 55:45. And in 2021, he set a new winter FKT (fastest known time), covering more than 100 miles between the 26 lakes, meres and waters of the Lake District: 24:31:29.
‘Even three years ago, if you’d told me I’d be running with Damian Hall in the Spine Race and we were both about to break the male record, I’d have said you were absolutely bonkers,’ he says. In a beautiful finale, Hall and Scott finished simultaneously, Hall in 84:36:24, while Scott, burdened with a time penalty, ended up with 85:16:24. ‘It was literally a dream come true.’
At the Spine, which journeys the full Pennine Way from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders, he could have won if it wasn’t for a navigational error that cost him the extra time. Near a diversion, due to forest damage with which he was unfamiliar, he looked at the GPS on his phone upside down and turned left instead of right. At the next checkpoint, around
