Shropshire GP wins 268-mile Pennine Way running race
A GP from Shropshire was the first woman to cross the finish line on this year’s summer spine race along the Pennine Way.
Dr Jenny Hartley completed the 268-mile run from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders in under four and a half days.
Speaking with Pulse, Dr Hartley, who ended up sixth overall, said she’d only signed up to the brutal event four weeks earlier.
The Montane Summer Spine sees more than 700 competitors carrying all their kit to traverse boggy moorland and uneven paths through the Yorkshire Dales, Northumberland National Park, Hadrian’s Wall and the Cheviots while battling unpredictable weather.
An experienced ultra runner, Dr Hartley had done lots of 50-mile races and the multi-day Dragon’s Back which traverses the mountains of Wales but had only previously run 78 miles in one go.
‘It was non-stop bog’, she explained. ‘My feet were wet from Sunday morning until Thursday evening and you’re constantly thinking is that a bog or a flagstone.’
Running through multiple nights was also a new experience but he joked she had been training for the sleep deprivation her whole life having been in the Army for 20 years and then night shifts as a junior doctor.
‘It was as bad as I thought it was going to be, but you just have to deal with it. I just kept going through my little toolbox of tricks – eating something, having a caffeine chew, squirting water in my eyeballs at one point.’
She survived with short power naps in a bivvy bag at the side the trail or a couple of hours curled up at a checkpoint.
‘I didn’t know whether I was going to finish it or not, because I’ve never done anything like this,’ she explains noting she kept expecting the ‘wheels to fall off’.
‘But I got to day three and I thought why not me? Women often don’t back themselves and I thought, I’m here, I’ve stayed in front for three days and maybe this could happen.’
Her colleagues at Portcullis Surgery in Ludlow were incredibly supportive even if they all think she’s mad, Dr Hartley adds.
‘They were sending me messages on the on the tracker app, and then they had a big feast for me on my first day back with a big chocolate cake,’ she says.
‘They also put a huge poster on my consulting room door, which I was not allowed to take down about what happened, so every patient that came in was saying, is that why you’re limping?’
Dr Hartley, who qualified as a GP in 2019 is medical student lead at the practice and is about to take up a teaching role as GP clinical lead at Keele University. She also leads on women’s health.
Her prize for winning the Spine was a free entry to next year’s race which she says at the moment ‘feels more like a punishment’.
The next running event on her calendar is a far more sedate 50k in the Brecon Beacons in five weeks’ time.
‘I want that feeling of moving faster rather than trudging through ankle deep bogs for days.’
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