Fell runner Julie Carter on how the sport changed her life

For three days in 2020, Julie Carter ran towards her past rather than away from it. Julie is a champion fell runner. She has been a scientist, a teacher, a GP and a writer. But she has often felt like a failure. Running from her home in Portinscale to her native North East was a way of trying to make sense of that. And, ideally, to change it.

“It was an instinct thing,” says Julie. “I felt through the run, something would be realised emotionally for me. But I didn’t really understand what that would be. I suppose it was this sense of total disconnection from my own past. And grief at that.”

Julie’s recently published book, Makin’ a Mackem, is a tale of two journeys: the run, and her life up to that point.

Mackem is a nickname for people from Sunderland, where Julie grew up. Her run was to Gateshead, to connect with the legacy of her great-grandfather, Jack Nowell, who in 1904 founded Gateshead Harriers athletics club.

In the book she writes: “I have lived my life trying to ignore, deny and escape from all that I believe I have inherited. This run is an attempt to re-examine all that. Because even though I get on with the business of living to the best of my abilities, I carry a sense that I come from badness and was grown in badness.”

On a warm afternoon in Julie’s back garden, such darkness seems far away. Julie is warm too, softy spoken, thoughtful, quick to smile.

Julie Carter But her childhood was scarred by difficult relationships with her parents and sexual abuse by her grandmother’s new husband. She writes: “Guilt and shame were the food I ate and the air I breathed; they became part of my physical make-up. And running somehow helped to detoxify me.”

Julie started running while she was in sixth form, and was good at it. But there were more important things than medals. “Finding the freedom in your body to let go of that anxiety and pent-up emotion,” she says. “Some kind of physical outlet. I’m not sure how I would have dealt with life if I hadn’t had that.”

Then came the discovery that her great-grandfather had such a positive influence on his community, and generations to come, by creating one of the UK’s most successful running clubs. Julie writes of “a longing within me, a need to be of a lineage, to belong to a place and tribe”.

Now she says, “I feel like I’ve come from somewhere. Something rather than nothing is a big thing. To feel that I’ve got no family now, and the family I did have were a right shower, to then think, but that’s not the real story. If you look a bit deeper, there’s plenty to feel connected to.”

That connection goes beyond even the friends she has made at Gateshead Harriers, whose vest she now wears when competing, and her sense of belonging with an admirable ancestor. These days Julie feels connected to the past of everyone and everything.

“I feel more and more that I’m a product of the past. Not just my 60 years on this planet and my parents and grandparents and great-grandfather. But the whole of what being a human animal is.

Julie Carter Image: Jessie Leong “I know I’m a unique individual, as we all are. And I do feel I have agency. But I feel 99 per cent of what I’ve got, I’ve been given. By nature, if you want to call it nature.”

Julie recalls a spell years ago when she worked at a hospital in Australia. One evening she and her partner Mandy visited Uluru, the sandstone monolith also known as Ayers Rock.

“We were compelled to go up. It was like we’d been beguiled in some mythological way. We went up. The place was red. The sky was red. And we were red. And it did something to both of us that made us feel, we don’t walk on this earth – we’re from this earth. We felt like things that had come out of the earth, rather than being put on it.

“Some people have such a connection with their place and their land. I witnessed that with those indigenous people in Australia. And I thought, I will never have that. “Then I started living in the Lakes and became a fell runner. Through that, I felt like I am now from this land. This is my place. I feel like I don’t run on it, I kind of run in it.”

Julie discovered the Lakes when she was 13, on a school trip to Derwent Hill Outdoor Centre. She now lives 200 yards from it.

She says: “The best thing that happened to me as a kid was coming to Derwent Hill. That saved me in many ways. It opened my eyes to the outdoors. I lived for coming to the Lake District.”

A few months ago Julie visited one of her many fell running friends, the legendary Joss Naylor, who sadly died in June aged 88. “I’d had in my mind for ages that I wanted to do something for Derwent Hill. I went to see Joss. He raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for [youth charity] Brathay Trust. He said, ‘If you’ve got any sort of name, you could use it to benefit somebody.’ And I’m like, ‘Hmm...’”

Derwent Hill is owned by Sunderland City Council and provides outdoor adventure for the city’s children. To mark turning 60, which Julie did last April, she decided to embark on a fundraising run to help Sunderland’s youngsters have the kind of transformative experience she enjoyed.

Julie Carter on Dale Head, with the expands of Newlands Valley below One morning in October, Julie will set off from Derwent Hill. She hopes to arrive in Sunderland the following afternoon, having run about 95 miles. “I took three days to run to Gateshead,” she says. “This is a PR stunt with the aim to raise as much money as possible, so I’ve got to do it as a oner.

“I’m kind of scared of it. I’ve never run that far in a oner before. What if I make a total idiot of myself? What if I just fall to bits and I can’t do it?” She pauses. “I guess I’ll just have to do it!”

This mindset helped Julie win many fell races, but that feels like a former life now. Her body is increasingly debilitated by a genetic spinal problem. She also suffers chronic pain since fracturing her pelvis after a climbing fall in 2018. But she is delighted to be running again.

“I didn’t think I’d be able to do the Lakeland Classic long races anymore. This year I’ve done three. It just depends how the pain is.

“I used to be super-competitive. I trained like mad. I won the British champs in my age group. Now I look back and I do not know how I did those times. I just can’t conceive that I was such a good athlete, even eight years ago.

“It gave me a lot. It was something truly special. But it’s special in the way that your competitors and you are trying to make each other the best you can be and have the most intense and brilliant experiences that you can have. The competition isn’t the end – the end is the experience. I can still remember what the sky looked like, or what it felt like to try and close out that race.”

Makin’ a Mackem describes running on Blencathra one winter morning at sunrise, ‘

“the fells covered in deep pristine snow and a golden light reflecting from all the tiny airborne crystals. It wasn’t just the sun that was golden but the whole air”.

She describes this brutal sport as bringing “a feeling of deep, deep satisfaction”. “Some of these athletes could be really successful in a different discipline. They’d be a really big name. But they love this sport. It’s a hard, hard sport. But you can be so in love with it, you don’t want to let it go.”

Julie is about to push herself via fell running again, in a very different way. The sport is the subject of a new show she has brought to Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake. After that it will then tour in Cumbria and beyond. The Dreamtime Fellrunner – which launched the theatre’s Cumbriafest that showcases new writing – is an exploration of her fell running life, incorporating themes including feminism, history and literature.

Makin’ a Mackem by Julie Carter “It combines a lot of elements that don’t often come together, like sport, art, poetry. It’s about Cumbria. It’s about the fells. There’s a mixture of monologue, comedy and performance. Each poem is like a little story in itself that I have to kind of act. The second half is more informal and chatty, with a Q&A.”

Having endured so much – some of it in childhood, some of it in her chosen sport – Julie says she feels happier than ever now. “When you’ve had the experiences I’ve had as a kid, your self-esteem is hardly existent.

“There are ways in which it affects me even now. I’m frightened of certain situations where I have to be a little bit assertive with a man, for example. It takes a lot to build yourself up. You can always tell yourself that you’re rubbish. Sometimes in the past, my response to that was to push harder at everything.

“When you get older, it simply does not work. Realising that has brought a lot more self-compassion. What you can do is be very grateful for all the wonderful things and use those things to give you support.”

And we’re back to a recurring theme: the importance of looking beyond ourselves. “If we only tune in to the minutiae of our own lives, it can feel really insecure and scary. I less and less think of myself as an individual. I feel more reliant on other people all the time. I think we’re all bound up with each other and we all need each other.

“Fell running is a brilliant community. You might describe me as a left-wing, lesbian poet. So I’m hardly a traditionalist. But the tradition of fell running’s fabulous. It really makes you feel part of something that’s bigger than yourself. And that feeling is brilliant.”