As part of my training, I ran another marathon—the Loch Ness Marathon—in September 2002. I was getting fitter and used to being outdoors all the time. I could feel at home anywhere. The night before the race I camped the night beside Loch Ness. The water sparkled as the stars came out, looking mysterious enough for one to believe anything. I thought of putting biscuits out for Nessie but fell asleep instead so she never came to visit after all.
I was lucky enough to get booked to give a few talks to help with funds and to begin promoting cancer awareness.
An especially memorable occasion was a lunch function at the Bolton and Bury Chamber of Commerce. I was training hard now, and had gone running and camping in the hills the night before, getting my one good blouse all crumpled as I had lain on it by mistake. No problem. I ran down into Bury town early and popped into McDonald’s because they have nice hard seats in the cafe where I could sit on the blouse to iron it. I was very pleased with the ‘ironing’ and got a bit carried away and decided to wash my hair in the ‘Ladies’ while I was at it. Unfortunately I got my head stuck in the machine on the wall on which there were signs saying ‘soap…hot air…water’. To my relief, two girls came in and rescued me, so that was fine. The hazards of modern life! But it taught me a valuable lesson in the gentle ‘art of making do’ or improvisation that was going to be very useful during my run.
The talks helped boost my courage. The Chairman of the Chamber even posed with the Saucony shoes around his neck along with his golden chain to show solidarity with my goals, and then they put them around my neck for a photo for their journal and stood there cheering me—while a bishop who was there blessed the shoes, wishing for God to go with me—as indeed he did.
By now I was beyond feeling excited or apprehensive; I had no time to be introspective. Every single second was taken up getting ready to go, thinking about it, trying to get everything right.
At Christmas I stayed at home, spending hours calling my family, then set off on my fine new bicycle, bought for me by my friends Chester and Jean in Pembroke Dock. I passed much of the day cycling, visiting friends, only spending a little time with them, and then on to the next—being careful not to drink too much wine! I couldn’t quite yet bear sharing a whole family Christmas—it hurt somehow—but then suddenly in the New Year I knew that Clive was happy, having a riot of fun up in heaven, and that I didn’t have to worry. He was with his friends.
I decided to set off in October 2003. I’d have to run through the European winter to Moscow but that would give me the whole of the first summer to get through as much of treacherous Siberia as I could before winter came again.
Siberia derives its name from ‘Siber’—land without end—and that is what it’s like. I could not escape the Siberian winter since it is so vast and the distances too great, but I wanted to run across as much of it as possible before the extreme cold set in. It was likely to be −40 or −50°C but the temperatures could plummet as low as −70°C in Eastern Siberia.
I planned my route, through Holland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia to Riga, and then from Riga to Moscow and on from there to Siberia—and beyond. I did not have the big Russian visa yet, but was working on it. For Lithuania and Latvia, British subjects do not require visas. If the Russian visa problem got solved, there was just a slight possibility that I might run from Poland through Russian Kallingrad to get to Riga, as it was shorter than going through Lithuania and Latvia, but time would tell.
My house-plants grew to the ceiling, thriving on neglect. The house dusted itself. I made a pot of stew once a week, eating it all the time, and got out so many maps and plans the living-room floor was always covered with them so you couldn’t see any carpet to Hoover anyway.
The planning and preparation for my world run were all-consuming and there were promises to keep before I even set off. Clive and I had planned to trek in Nepal in aid of the Nepal Trust and the Rotary’s Club’s work in the isolated Himalayas. When he had been very sick, he had asked me to go up to the big Rotary Conference in Glasgow—and I promised the audience of 2000 that we would go to Nepal when he was better. As he had not been able to do so—I had to do this myself.
So in April just for six weeks, I left on this strange tangent. It was high-altitude training that was valuable, but it was much more than that. Liz and Jim Donovan, who run the Nepal Trust, invited me to run and trek to fulfil Clive’s dearest wish. Maybe Clive’s persistent desire that he might make it, even when very ill, was a kind of foreknowledge that it would help me, as well as helping the extraordinary work of the Nepal Trust. The small charity, together with huge input by Rotary International, have brought health, literacy and income to people in the forgotten high Himalayas at Humla and other especially remote places, targeting areas where need is greatest. They had steadfastly continued this even during the civil war in Nepal that killed 10,000 people in the previous eight years.
Accompanied by 20 young Nepalese men and women, tough and fast as Gurkhas, I ‘speed-trekked’ over 32 mountain passes to Everest Base Camp. Even though we kept getting held up by Maoists, we did 1750km in 68 days, raising the money for the hospital and clinics.
Through the Nepal Trust I met Liza Hollinghead, who runs the Ecologia Travel Company, founded to help fund the Kitezh Community for Children in Russia, which looks after orphans rescued from heartbreaking situations. I was so inspired to be helping both these charities that I added them to the causes, along with cancer awareness, that I was going to support on my run. Dedicated and determined, Liza managed to get me the long-term Russian visa where everybody else had failed.
My worries about having no contacts in Siberia were also sorted when I spotted an ad in a running magazine for the Siberian Marathon taking place on 3 August. Woman’s Weekly commissioned me to write an article, so I’d have enough money to go for the marathon. In Omsk I stayed with Elena in her neat home in a crumbling apartment, learning quite a lot about life in Western Siberia during my few days there.
Omsk is a beautiful city, but life is hard here. People clean their water by filtering and repeatedly straining and boiling it for three days before it’s safe to drink or make a cup of tea.
They are too poor to replace the old Soviet factories upriver which empty dangerous chemicals into the water. It looks clean to the eye but is often toxic and there’s a high incidence of cancer here, I was told. Doctors fight this battle even though the wages of a doctor are so low that a doctor has to have several jobs to survive—and the hospital has few facilities. I was so glad to be running the Siberian Marathon in aid of the Siberian Railway Hospital after I visited it. The head doctor blithely described how he’d cut a patient open, put his guts onto a sterilised plate, removed the rotten bits and popped them back before sewing him up. The patient recovered fine.
People really put everything out for the Siberian Marathon. Bright stalls selling all kinds of things were set up and flags flown. Everyone lined the streets, cheering so loudly from the first mile, just as in the London Marathon.
I’d have to run 6000 miles before I next saw Omsk, but I had a home and good friends there already. I was also very lucky to meet Geoff Hall, the only other British runner, who even allowed me to take his photo for Woman’s Weekly. Geoff became an exceptional supporter of my run, coordinating my equipment from the UK, sending me shoes and other kit to isolated parts of the world, and making all the difference. It was amazing that I went all the way to Siberia to meet one of the British lynchpins of my whole run.
After the race, as the plane took off, with the crimson of an exquisite Siberian sunrise bathing the circle of the horizon, my heart was