The sun sinks over Loch Linnhe as myself and around 20 others make our way up a steep section of single track in Fort William, carefully negotiating the odd icy patch. We pause at the top to admire the last of the sunset, which on a February evening in the Scottish Highlands leaves us in total darkness by 5:30 p.m.
Then we switch on the Petzl headlamps we’ve been given to test and begin running down a forested track, guided by two leads from Girls On Hills, the UK's only guided trail running company designed specifically for women. Without the need to navigate, I lean into the experience of running in the dark and it soon becomes meditative, the velvety dark spaces between the trees feel protective rather than ominous.
Trail running at night wasn’t something I’d previously considered. When I lived in the Rocky Mountains, fear of being attacked by a hungry mountain lion or colliding with a befuddled bear was enough to keep me away. Now back in Scotland, the habit has stuck, but I suddenly realize there’s nothing in our wilderness that counts as a predator, and my daily window for running in winter is as long as I want it to be.
“Anything that's neural is something that we can change,” says ultra runner and mountain guide Keri Wallace, co-founder of Girls on Hills when we discuss it later – and she should know.
At the end of 2024, after years of planning her training and competition schedule to avoid running in the dark, Wallace did something no woman had done before – she ran Scotland’s classic long distance route, the 96-mile West Highland Way, non-stop and unsupported in winter. It took her 28 hours and 18 minutes and a full 17 hours of that time was spent in total darkness.
“I've been trying to desensitize myself to it for years because it has been a barrier. So I've been pushing against it, and I have been making myself go out, but still feeling anxious about it,” says Wallace.
Into the dark
Her fear of the dark isn’t tied to anything specific, except maybe watching too many horror movies, but several negative incidents early in her running career left her with more generalized fear and anxiety – she was spat at, groped at a race finish line and punched in the face by a man who was trying to steal her car while she was loading up her climbing equipment.
These traumatic encounters, combined with a longstanding fear of the dark, led Wallace to subscribe to the narrative that women are constantly subjected to as runners: don’t run in the dark, don’t run alone, wear bright colors, carry a tracker and so on.
“If you've had a negative experience, it's pretty hard to argue with yourself that it's not going to happen, or it's unlikely. Even if it is extremely unlikely to happen again, you know, like lightning strikes – it's unlikely, but unfortunately you've been burned.”
It wasn’t until she was researching routes for her new book Running Challenges that Wallace began to spot a pattern – many long distance routes, which would require running through the night, didn’t have a Fastest Known Time logged by a female runner. This, she says, is even though in the UK, there's very little statistical evidence of assaults on runners in rural environments.
Wallace has a PhD in Neurobiology from Cambridge so she put her research cap on to try to understand the relationship between fear of the dark and perceived personal safety. Her project, Into the Dark, began with a survey, open to all genders, which asked runners to rate their level of anxiety from one (almost none) to 10 (so afraid you won’t run in the dark) in urban, suburban and rural environments.
“I wanted to find out initially if fear of the dark was something completely separate from running, and how many people felt afraid of the dark.”
Fear of the dark exacerbates all fears
The survey showed that most men are not afraid of running in the dark. Only 14 percent said they were afraid of night running in urban environments, where research shows they are more likely to experience harassment, and none were afraid of running in the countryside in the dark.
Women runners were six times more likely than men to be afraid of the dark, and the results were much more complicated. Instead of women becoming less afraid the further they got from urban areas, the data showed that women were largely afraid in all environments in the dark. Women who did run in rural areas in the dark said they felt it was less likely they’d meet someone, but they were still afraid, and often those fears were around falling and getting injured and being far from help. Basically, Wallace says, fear of the dark exacerbates all fears.
Fear of falling or being attacked might sound quite reasonable, especially if you’re in the 58 percent of women who have experienced harassment while running. But fear of the dark is an evolutionary stronghold dating back to the days when humans were prey, and Wallace says today it’s not helpful or rational in most cases.
As women, we are statistically more prone to developing anxiety disorders than men to the tune of 60 percent and for reasons that science doesn’t yet totally understand, but could include hormonal differences and societal influences, it may be harder for us to overcome our fears even when they’re no longer relevant.
“If that process is in some way defective, you hold on to those anxieties at a time when they're no longer productive or beneficial. And that's almost like the definition of a phobia where you've got an excessive fear that's debilitating and ultimately irrational.”
Pushing back
On December 3, 2024, Wallace set off for her longest night run yet on the West Highland Way to challenge these fears. She was familiar with the area and she figured she wouldn’t meet too many other people. As it turns out, she didn’t see another person for 62 straight miles, from Conic Hill all the way to Kinlochleven.
“I set myself some rules like, don't look over your shoulder, don't look into the bushes, don't listen out for suspicious noises, because all that just fuels the fear.”
What she didn’t do was follow all the advice for women running in the dark. She didn't wear bright colors or carry any defensive tools, she barely kept people updated and didn’t wear a GPS tracker.
“I made a very conscious decision to allow myself to break all the rules that people set for women to run safely. I wasn't deliberately being obtuse, but I wanted to push back against the idea that I was actually vulnerable, and go out there and distract myself.”
“Being told constantly that you're unsafe, you're a victim, it just feeds the kind of negative mindset of, I'm vulnerable all the time.”
What she did do, ironically, is wear running headphones (which she admits is “a massive no-no”) and listened to crime fiction the entire way.
“I knew if I don't listen to my headphones I'm going to hear creaks and wind and swaying, and owls hooting and rustles in the bushes, and I'm just going to get completely freaked out. And it isn't going to be anything I need to worry about.”
It's okay to look at your own fears and anxieties
There were some panic-inducing moments – dense woodland, creepy underpasses, a barn owl, a derelict graveyard – but Wallace’s obstacles turned out to be typical runner problems. There wasn’t any snow so she didn’t wear gaiters. That meant her shoes got wet, then froze solid at night so she couldn’t get them off to deal with blisters. In retrospect she’d have brought a different backpack, carried more food and planned out water sources more carefully. Gross. Uncomfortable. Not the stuff of nightmares.
“It's okay to push back against these fears and to recognize that the safety advice that we hear again and again is maybe actually holding us back to an extent.”
Three months on, Wallace finds she can go for a run at night when she doesn’t have time during the day. And she hopes her nocturnal dash will be helpful for any ultra runner or runner in northern climes.
“It's not always safe out there, but there are some environments where it is safe. And it's okay to look at your own fears and anxieties and ask, are they beneficial, or are they a barrier?”
There are tools you can use to help you get on the trail in the dark – a really good running headlamp, a backup headlamp, spare batteries, a Personal Locator Beacon. But Wallace has shown a huge amount of it is just doing it, step by step, changing your mindset and increasing the amount of time you spend in the dark. Maybe even listening to crime fiction if that works for you.
