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Kilcoole’s Liam Vines goes to the brink and back during the infamous Spine Race
Physical exhaustion, hallucinations, the loss of six toenails and the understanding that the human body is an amazing machine are just some of the experiences and learnings that Kilcoole mountain runner Liam Vines has taken away from his recent completion of the Montane Spine Race in England. Running from Edale in the Peak District in England to Kirk Yetholm in Scotland, along the Pennine Way, for a mind numbing 431km, competitors have seven days to finish a race that brings them to the very brink of exhaustion. This year’s race was won by Dublin’s Eoin Keith in a time of 92:40:30. Liam Vines started the race on a Sunday afternoon and crossed the finished line the following Friday at lunchtime after enduring tough climbs, the seemingly endless nothingness of moors and never-ending byroads, an impromptu eight-hour race in the middle of the actual race with four other runners that cut about eight hours off his overall time and an evil mist that grew arms and tried to attack him in the middle of the night. “I still can’t even fully let go and say, ‘ah yeah, it was deadly’, because it wasn’t, it was absolutely brutal. It’s an amazing race but it is brutal, it’s relentless,” said Liam just days after getting home. “I’m absolutely broken. I’m still running in my sleep at night. Woke up this morning and it felt like I was after running another 50 miles,” he added. Liam played and coached Gaelic football with Kilcoole GAA Club until he was 40 years of age, winning an Intermediate championship in 1992 with the Goosebankers and wearing the jersey with pride. It was when he hung up the boots that he realised that he had to find something else to do. And it wasn’t long before he found it. “Near the end of my football career I was thinking that there has to be something after football, and I started into running. I got involved with IMRA (Irish Mountain Running Association) and started running in the mountains and I absolutely loved it. “There was a guy from Dublin, lives in Cork, Eoin Keith, he actually won the Spine Race this year. He’s a bit of a legend in the game. He did it six or seven years ago, the first time he won it. I’ve been looking at it since then, but it’s been way too big for me, way, way, way too big. “I got a load of stuff done (between then and now). I’m not a novice or a back-of-the-field runner but I don’t consider myself a superstar or anything. I have won a few races. I’ve won the Art O’Neill which is on at the weekend, and people consider me a very competitive runner, but I’d look at myself as a very ordinary runner, and I run with absolutely everybody. It doesn’t matter what standard they are or whatever. “This came on my radar, but it was a massive, massive step up. Everything I have done up to now is what I call ‘between sleeps’. You get out of bed, you run, maybe for 30 or 40 hours, but you’re still doing it between sleeps. So, you keep running for however long and you play with all the demons that come with tiredness – for example, I’ve done the Wicklow Round a couple of times, it’s a 24-hour event. “So, you get up in the morning or you get up in the evening after a few hours’ sleep and you come home, and you go to bed, and it’s finished. “This race is an end-to-end race. The clock never stops. It’s up to you how long you run for. There are five aid stations along the route where you can get your head down. And the maximum time you can spend in those stations is six hours. That includes getting your bag changed over, getting food, getting your feet sorted and then whatever sleep you want to take. “That’s where the demons come in. How much do you play with how little sleep you get. If you want me to be honest, I probably went out there thinking I could compete – not to the top five or the podium – but I thought I could compete with the top 10. So, what happens is, a load of really, really good lads, top, top men, go flat out at it for five days. Somebody is going to blow up. It happened this year. Four of the five top lads had to pull out. “It’s up to you how much time you spend (sleeping). I did the five days on nine hours sleep, plus having to nap on my hands and knees while trying to get rid of the demons of hallucinations and all that. It’s mental stuff. It’s absolutely bonkers. “The hallucinations started after 35/37 hours. There are five checkpoints. The first is after 80km, and that’s purely a pitstop. You’re in, bite to eat, change the socks and back out the door. Because you can imagine, 80km into 420km is peanuts. It’s a good race on most days but it’s peanuts in this race. “The next stop is another 100km away. That’s a long, long, long leg. I couldn’t say the race is the hardest climbing or whatever, but everything in it goes on for hours and hours. There’s so much darkness. It’s nearly more of a mind over matter game than a physical game. The darkness goes on forever. “So, coming into the second aid station, checkpoint two, I was coming down these muddy fields, down off these mucky mountains. We had been by these water reservoirs, and I thought we were coming down to a reservoir with a lovely, big powerboat out on the water. I could see the name on the side of it and everything. It was beautiful. It was in the marina. And then I realised I was looking at a lump of snow. This is what your mind starts doing to you. “I was coming down through the town thinking there’s a dude with a motorcycle helmet trying to break into a car and there’s nobody there at all. It’s just stuff like that. Madness. “I had it that night, but I got the four hours’ sleep, got the dinner in the checkpoint which are like hostels. Got the feet fixed, head sorted, feet fixed and bunk down. “And then the very last night I chose not to sleep in the checkpoint. The last leg is 40km and it took me 14 hours to do it in the end. I chose not to stop at the checkpoint because I reckoned I was going to completely seize up if I stopped. If I had put my head down and slept, I would have completely seized up, and I felt good, but I knew I would be so, so tired. “And as the night went on a mist came in, and this is all on an open mountain, the Cheviots are what they’re called, up near the border with Scotland. And I’m running in the black dark in the mist and the mist starts to get hands and branches that are coming out to whack me off the path. I’m going along and I’m talking to them, and I’m calling them all the names under the sun. “Eventually, there’s nowhere to hide, there’s a good strong wind and nowhere to hide, you could get all your gear out of your bag and bivvy down and get an hour’s sleep and that would cure the hallucinations, but what I chose to do was – after 100 hours in I was actually racing a dude behind me. Like, 100 hours in and we decided to race – so I decided that I would get down on my elbows and knees (to keep the body off the ground so I wouldn’t get cold) and I set my alarm for 10 minutes and slept. And I know I slept because you know that falling feeling when you wake up in bed, I kept getting that feeling so obviously the cold was coming in on me and I’d get that feeling and wake up and look at my watch. And I never got to 10 minutes, it was always three- or four-minutes sleep but I would get back up and run and the hallucinations would be gone, and I’d run for an hour, maybe two hours. I did that for eight hours. “I’m just explaining this, this is not meant to be a boast. This was all new to me. I haven’t even let myself go. I haven’t gone ‘woo hoo’. People are ringing me to say well done. The family were all here with balloons and stuff in my house, and I was kind of going, ‘yeah, sure it’s only a run’. “I’m probably still scared of it, truth be known. “I’m probably still a little bit scared of what I did. It’s just a different species of a race. “And the funny thing about it is, on day three, the Thursday, I finished on the Friday, lunchtime, but on the Thursday, I was plodding along, an ok pace, trying to get the job done as quick as you can. And three or four lads came up behind me, lads that I had known from the race, and they were moving really well. And I said to myself I could knock hours off my time if I just stick with these for a few hours. And I went with them, and we ended up racing for eight hours. I’d say by going with them I knocked seven or eight hours off my time at the end. Massive. But the funny thing about it is, the body can do it. The body is amazing. We were 80 or 90 hours in at that stage and the body could still up the pace and still do it. “I know I did an awful lot of training for this, and the training I did probably allowed me to run that race that day, but the unknown of the race, I was blown away. I was totally overwhelmed at the start of it. I’ve done big races before, but I was standing at the start going to myself, ‘FIVE DAYS’. I was standing there, knowing nobody, on my own and I just had this overwhelming feeling of ‘FIVE DAYS’. And then you get to the top of the first climb and you’re blowing bubbles, thinking you’re wrecked and wondering how you’re going to do this for five days. I don’t know, it’s just mental, it’s absolutely mental,” he said. Liam says that he’s “good” since he returned home. “I don’t look like death warmed up or anything,” he joked. “I’m tired as bejaysus. I did a little job there this morning and you’re working away and it’s like somebody hit you over the head with a hurl. You’re zonked again. But that’s to be expected. I’ll probably get a big emotional low, I’ll feel like a never want to run again, and that will last a few days, hopefully. “But you know the best thing about it at the moment? You can eat whatever you want for the next two weeks. I’ve been down to my mother’s for the dinner, back to my own house for another dinner. I’ll have as much junk food as I want for the next two weeks. You’re like ‘empty legs’. It just all falls into the bottom of your legs and disappears,” he added. The 49-year-old described how he lost six toenails after the race. He said that blisters formed under the toenails and caused him excruciating pain and had to be taken off, but he added that he was on the mend. Asking him what’s next on the running agenda was probably not the wisest move given the state of mind the Kilcoole man was in, but we said we’d risk it. “I don’t really know,” he said wearily. “There’s a competition in the Alps and that would be on the bucket list, but I don’t know. Either that or just go and try and get faster running a 100-mile race. “In the short term just back to running short races with IMRA. I have another plan to run the 51 peaks in Wicklow and Dublin that are over 500m. I was going to run all of them in the one go. I think it’s a 270km loop. It would be more my kind of running,” he added. For now, Liam Vines is going to rest, and eat, probably in equal measure by the sounds of it! And, in fairness, he deserves it!
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