Team Wounded headed off into the darkness and promptly got lost. There was fog on the hills and visibility was down to ten metres. Coming down from a crag onto a narrow road, they went west instead of east and lost a good half-hour. “We went down the wrong valley,” says Dags. “I don’t know who was responsible, Ed or Martin, but it was quite funny watching the blame game going on.”
After Checkpoint 5, the terrain became rougher, the ground covered with big grassy tussocks, evocatively known as babies’ heads…then, as they reached Checkpoint 7, one of the marshals approached with the news that they were being taken off the race.
“We had a punch-up,” says Dags. “Not a physical one, but it wasn’t far off! We’d been going like billy-o and by that stage were third in the race. We knew we could do a whole lot more, but for safety reasons they weren’t going to allow us to go on. There was a marshall there who was saying ‘Rules is rules.’ But we hadn’t yet pushed ourselves to the point where we were really shattered, which is what we wanted to do to test ourselves. Ed sounded off massively. Then one of them radioed back to base camp, but they came back with, ‘No, no, you’ve got to pull them off.’ We said, ‘We’re not going to pull off, thank you very much. We’re going to carry on. Stuff you!’”
Fortunately, at that moment, Ed spotted an old acquaintance who had just arrived at the checkpoint. He was a legendary army figure. “A silence fell over things,” says Alex, “and Ed turned to this character and said ‘Sir, are you going to allow this to happen?’ He was saying, ‘I’ve got nothing to do with it, really, nothing to do with me.’ But then he skirted round and had a quiet chat with the marshals. They were Hereford men who referred to him as ‘the boss’.
“There was a big old kerfuffle,” says Dags, “but in the end they said, ‘OK then, off you go.’”
“I think that was a real low point for Dags,” say Martin, mischievously, “realising we’d won our argument and he now had a load more miles to go. His feet were sore and he hobbled off like an old man with a hunched back.”
“From a personal perspective,” Simon admits, “I was fucked.”
On they slogged, reaching Checkpoint 9 almost in the dark. “The marshal told us it was over,” wrote Ed, “and this time there were no complaints. We were delighted to stop.”
As it turned out, only two teams had finished the course. Walking With The Wounded had come in third place, far better than anyone had expected. The winners were local men, keen fell runners who had been training for the race for the last year and had used a GPS to find their route. According to this instrument, they had actually walked 42 miles over the day, while Walking With The Wounded had covered thirty-six miles to reach Checkpoint 9.