Scottish fell running champion smashes 93K Ramsay Round FKT

Fell running champion Finlay Wild of Scotland set a new fastest known time (FKT) on the Ramsay Round on Monday. He finished the 93K run through the Scottish Highlands in 14 hours, 42 minutes and 40 seconds, beating the previous FKT by an hour and a half. This is a big enough result on its own, but Wild ran solo and unsupported, while the time to beat (which was 16 hours, 12 minutes and 32 seconds, set in 2019) was a supported run. Wild became the 182nd runner to complete the famed route in under 24 hours. 

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Ramsay Round 

The route was created by Charlie Ramsay, a fell runner from Scotland, who is credited with the Round’s first sub-24 result, which he ran in 1978. Since then, it has grown into a well-known challenge for fell runners across the U.K. To complete the route, runners must cover the full 93K and summit 24 Munros (mountains over 3,000 feet). The challenge has a total elevation gain of 8,686m, just shy of the height of Mount Everest. Runners start and finish the run at the Glen Nevis Youth Hostel in Fort William with the goal of making it back before 24 hours have passed. Wild far surpassed this bar, completing the route more than nine hours quicker than Ramsay did 42 years ago. 

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Wild’s unsupported run

An unsupported run is exactly how it sounds: with no one supporting them, runners have to carry everything they’ll need for the run. That means food, water, any extra clothes they may need, sleeping gear (if the route is long enough to require breaks for sleep) and anything else they want to bring. On a supported run, on the other hand, runners can have a team follow them or meet them at points along the route to give them food, refill their water and give them a place to sleep. Wild ran the Ramsay Round completely unsupported, but he still beat the supported FKT by more than an hour. 

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On Twitter after his run, Wild posted a picture of everything he took with him for the Round. “Plenty food,” he wrote. “About 1.7 kg of it. Total kit about 3.6 kg with water bottles full.” He had more than 11 granola bars, a couple of energy gels, trail mix, several water bottles, a headlight, extra layers and much more. 

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He averaged a per-kilometre pace of 9:33 throughout the run (which includes breaks), and for a stretch of 10K about halfway through, he averaged sub-six-minute kilometres, as can be seen on his Strava profile. This is Wild’s seventh official FKT, two others of which were completed on variations of the Ramsay Round.