The Perfect Ten
West Highland Way Race 2019. If I was being polite and opting to flex my vocabulary a little bit, I might say that my race reports are characterised by self-deprecating humour. In my normal everyday idiom, what I mean is that I take the piss out of myself for cheap laughs. This isn’t hard; to utilise a lazy cliché, you might even compare it to shooting fish in a barrel – I’m a pathetically easy target. If we could get the goblet incident* out of the way in paragraph one, my husband correctly guessing that I was the cause of the sound of shattered crystal and the attendant, horrifying, collective intake of breath that followed, without actually witnessing the heinous act, should give some indication of the level of fecklessness at which I operate on a regular basis. Ultra race reports are prime fodder for this approach. I like to think of them as the antithesis of your typical Instagram account, where legs are always fresh, smiles are broad, outfits on point, running is a medium