Almost a year on, I still don’t fit the clothes I used to wear before 2014’s Spine Race. I lost all my body fat and a significant amount of muscle too. Okay, I was hardly Arnold Schwarzenegger before, but now my T-shirts and jumpers hang off me like I’m a scarecrow (on the upside it has made me a faster runner). My wedding ring sometimes slides off my finger unnoticed when hand washing. And three of my toes still feel really weird.

The race messed up my thermostat and body clock for a while after too. Despite not being able to run for three weeks, I regularly woke in the middle of the night, sweating, panicky and ready to dash outdoors into the darkness. Worse than all of that, my wife refused to have any of my kit in our washing machine and I had to hobble to a laundrette and unload it and fumble for 50ps before the manager could smell the big pile of rotting outdoor gear and have it quarantined for scientific research.

I like doing things twice anyway, but I really can’t wait to go back and go through it all again on 10 January. The Spine calls itself “Britain’s most brutal race” and it’s a single-stage (meaning the clock is always ticking), mountain marathon along the 268-mile Pennine Way, England’s toughest national trail. You’re allowed seven days to complete it and race director Scott Gilmour calls his co-creation “almost perfect in its cruelty”.

It isn’t just a foot race. For some, it’s an obsession. I struggle to contain and explain the affect the Spine Race has on me. It’s combination of three of my greatest passions: the Pennine Way, distance running and getting unrecognisably muddy.

I had hiked the Pennine Way, and fallen head over boggy heels in love with it, when I wrote the official guidebook for it. So for 2014’s Spine Race I was prepared for the terrain, the weather and running a long way. Less so the sleep deprivation, which trigged vivid hallucinations that led me off route and had me talking out load to non-existent people and big red Chinese lanterns.

What I also wasn’t prepared for was the event’s special aura. The staff – many are volunteers, giving up their week to look after us smelly, mid-life-crisis idiots – are amazing, fetching cups of tea, taping up your foul feet, giving you endless encouragement, throughout the night – when they’ve probably had less sleep than you.

Though there was tough love too. At one point, when presumably my commitment to reaching Kirk Yetholm looked open to question, I was told “You frigging [not verbatim] well will finish this race!” by the Spine’s wonderful “mother superior”, the legendary Nici Griffin. Which was exactly what I needed. Well that, dry socks and a gallon of strong tea.

Locals, too, have started to take some ownership of the four-year-old race. On a rainy night in the Yorkshire dales, in the middle of nowhere, a stranger was waiting to give me water and advise me on the route. On Hadrian’s wall, a hiker donated me food (I wasn’t begging, I should state, but maybe looked less than well nourished). I found out later that a hostel owner in Byrness, following the race online, stayed up well into the small hours on the remote chance I would call in.

At home, because of the trackers – designed for safety but turning the race into a social media phenomenon – I got many messages of goodwill, often from people I hadn’t spoken to for ages, and from those I didn’t realise had my number. People who had no interest in running or mountains seemed addicted to watching what my daughter called “Daddy’s wiggly line” (and it got more and more wiggly towards the end). A Kirk Yethlom runner who’d been watching the tracker came and ran a short way with me, which greatly lifted my spirits (I hadn’t seen another runner for three days).

You feel like you’re being pushed along by the goodwill of hundreds, and it can all get a bit much. In a state of sleep-deprived delusion (and especially if you have Bonnie Tyler’s Holding On For a Hero blasting in your ears) you can start thinking you’re achieving something real. You’re not. You’re just running a bit, selfishly, while your wife labours harder than is fair and the children you’re trying to inspire become worringly used to your absence.

The Spiners’ self-indulgent journey won’t change the world. Elsewhere people are running from real horrors. But almost all of us need more adventure, more wildness, more exercise, more bogs in our lives. And there are few better ways of getting all that than the brilliant Spine Race.

Above all, it’ll be that immense sense of freedom, powerful sense of mission, glorious feeling of being in wild, rugged and remote places, with like-minded people, high on endorphins and too many caffeine gels and wonderful, rare simplicity of days that I’ll enjoy. Swapping screens and bleeping technology for moody moorlands, enigmatic rock formations and melodramatic skies, for a whole magnificent week.

I’ve thought of The Spine Race more often this year than I thought about mammary glands as a 14-year-old. From January 2014, I distinctly remember running along in the snow in the dark and feeling almost alarmingly happy. Then reaching High Cup – the greatest view in England – the cataclysmic chasm blanketed in snow as dawn broke. The Pennine Way has some painfully beautiful places and a surprising remoteness. You’re often close to some of England’s biggest cities, but feel a million miles away.

The anniversary year makes it extra special time to following the hallowed route. This isn’t just any National Trail, it’s the first one and directly linked to ramblers’ secretary and first-world-war conscientious objector Tom Stephenson and 1932’s game-changing mass trespass on Kinder Scout. There are lots of books about it. The BBC will show a three-part TV documentary in the spring. January’s race is being turned into a film, so it’ll be fascinating to see how us loons appear to non-Spiners.

All that’s left for me to do now is double check my kit, continually stuff my cake hole with calories over Xmas, and collect a shed load of 50ps for the laundrette.

Follow the 2015 Spine Race at thespinerace.com from 10 January.

Damian Hall wrote the official Pennine Way guide and tweets about hiking, running and the Pennine Way at @damo_hall.

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