I had been shivering for a few hours and so turned to Andy – “have you thought about retiring?”. We battered through, traversed under Lochnagar, descended for lunch at Loch Muick and headed back up for a relentless – and fairly unenjoyable – slog. The weather set in as we rounded Meikle Pap – a forecast storm of rain and gusts of 60mph.

This ended on the Glen Gelder plain and feeling giddy we set off south towards the hills, picking up checkpoints. We waved goodbye to Megan and Issy, our friends doing the B, and ran off into the Balmoral forest for a short woodland section. We started just after sunrise on the Saturday, a beautiful morning with clear skies and the White Mounth hills rising crisp above the forest. Nor were we discouraged when no-one else had received this text, or that there were only a handful of people doing the A course. We were slightly concerned by a text from the GMC organiser asking if we were sure we knew what we had signed up for, but put this down to routine. The A-course seemed within our limits – 55km over two days Andy and I regularly run in the hills together and we thought we would manage this no bother. The best of mountain challenges are born from beer and I had signed us up to this in the height of summer after I couldn’t sleep due to the room spinning. The track of the Capel road came into sight – a tempting quick route to camp…. In front of us appeared a sea of peat hags and bog. Andy had a joint injury and I kept an eye on him over my shoulder – a soggy man with thumbs up. Sideways rain lashed our faces and the wind was unrelenting.

If you don’t recognise these names, there is a reason – the pathless landscape didn’t appear well-trodden. A few hours previously Andy, my partner, and I had been slowly traversing the high plateau between Sandy Hillock and Black Hill of Mark. What did you expect?” I was told these words around the heating element at the mid-way camp of GMC, a two-day orienteering challenge, this year set in the area around White Mounth.

“You signed up for a mountain marathon, in November, in the Cairngorms.

The pathless forest plateau