I like Anna McNuff. She’s an adventurer, runner, swimmer and Girlguiding ambassador and she has a lovely habit of turning her adventures into books. I want to be Anna when I grow up. Barefoot Britain is, I think, her sixth book and it covers her 2019 adventure running from Shetland to London, covering the distance of 100 marathons – with no shoes on.
Endurance adventure tales tend to go one of two ways. Less commonly, it’s a relentless story of how amazing everything was, how epic the adventure was, how beautiful the scenery, how brave and powerful the adventurer was – or it’s a relentless story of misery and hardship. I suppose you have to point out how difficult it was to emphasis that this was a proper adventure that not just anyone could do; it’s not just a holiday with a bit of a walk or a run or a paddle or whatever but you can’t take it too far. Misery-memoirs have fallen out of fashion and adventure readers want to read about triumph. You need the struggles for the conflict but you need to finish on a high – even if that high isn’t actually achieving the adventure in the end.
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Anna balances the epic vs the difficult pretty well. I want it to be all good – when you have a runner with bright pink hair, wearing some pretty neon outfits, to judge by her videos and Instagram, you want the adventure to have the same colourful upbeat feel all the way through. It would be wrong and inaccurate to do that but this story never ventures into full-on “this was the worst thing I’ve ever done!” territory. When you’re running 2,600 miles with no shoes on, bad things are bound to happen. You will stand on something at some point. Probably several points. So we have a couple of episodes of foot and leg pain and the major incident is a small cut that gets massively infected and does have an impact on the adventure. But somehow it’s never the adventure that’s the source of any conflict – if anything, it’s that the adventure gets forcibly paused. It’s the lack of adventure.
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This book makes me want to do three things. It makes me want to do an adventure of my own that I can tell Girlguiding groups about – because Anne does her barefoot run partly to inspire girls to get outdoors, get messy and have adventures, and partly to go into meetings in person along the way to tell them about it. It makes me want to go and bang on the door of CHQ and beg Girlguiding to make me an ambassador too – and no offence to Anna, but I’ve been a leader for fifteen and a half years and a leader with multiple units for thirteen and a half of them. And it makes me want to go out and cautiously investigate various surfaces with my bare feet. Maybe in sandals, so I can take them off and put them back on easily. I want to know what “naughty tarmac” actually feels like. I did a section of a walk in Dartmoor barefoot once, just from Haytor Quarry across to Smallacombe Rocks, which is all of about one kilometre. It wasn’t unpleasant, give or take sheep droppings. I was expecting to feel some kind of magic – people talk about grounding and energy and I spent a lot of that kilometre not feeling much except a sort of smooth compressed soil and fending off questions from passers-by about whether I was injured or didn’t have any shoes or whatever. I know what walking on sand is like – no, thank you. You sink half an inch on every step and that’s hard work. I would always choose the prom – or perhaps the harder sand right at the water’s edge – over walking on the beach.
This is partly a book about running the length of Britain. It’s also a book about community and people – many of the stages are open, ie people are actively invited to join Anna and run alongside her for the day, or however much of the day they’re able to run. Her route is on a live map, so people also turn up out of the blue occasionally. Anna runs with just a small backpack and there’s an entire chain of people passing her kitbag down the country so she can catch up with it when she needs to, and there’s another entire chain of people who house her, often keeping her for several nights, ferrying her back and forth to the start and finish of the runs while she’s in a particular reason. And of course, there are the Girlguiding talks. Actually, I was a little disappointed at how few of these appear. I suppose they’d get pretty repetitive pretty quickly for a reader, they’d take away from the run itself and they’d make the book intimidatingly big but I’d still like to see a few more. Where the girls do appear, they tend to be Brownies. That’s probably because that age group is the most enthusiastic and the least self-conscious but I’d have loved to see Rangers, the ones who are on the verge of being an age where they can go on adventures, being inspired. Yeah, I’ve done Rangers since 2007. They do not want to be identified as Rangers in public. Much as they might enjoy it in the privacy of the church hall, they don’t want their friends to see them in uniform.
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And the last thing about Anna: while she’s done her share of big and epic adventures, she isn’t shy about using the a-word for smaller things. I talked about her Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups in 2021 and it made me realise you can be an adventurer doing adventures, even if those adventures are biking the South Downs Way, rollerblading the perimeter of a city or having a pub dinner and then camping on the side of a hill. Those are adventures. Those are things “normal people” don’t do. Those are the sort of things that validate the part of me that’s constantly asking “Am I an adventurer?”. That’s why the fourth thing Anna makes me want to do is write a book about my own adventures. Because so many things are adventures and people should have more of them in their lives and this Guide has watched Anne McNuff inspiring people like me and has listened.
