Last, but not least: the woman who refused to stop, by Tamsin Whiteley
An original contemporary newspaper feature.
At 9.56 on Sunday evening, thirty-five hours and fifty-six minutes after she left the start line, Rosalie Ashworth shuffled into the floodlit car park at Harrow Edge and stopped. She did not raise her arms. She did not sprint. She simply bent forward, put both hands on her knees and stayed there, very still, while two hundred people who had waited in the cold for her began to roar.
She had finished last. Of the 212 runners who started the Harrow Edge 100, a hundred-mile race across the high moors of the Pennines, only 94 reached the end inside the thirty-six-hour limit. Rosalie, a fifty-eight-year-old school cook from Lowerby, was the ninety-fourth. She had four minutes to spare.
The winner, a twenty-six-year-old soldier, had crossed the line almost a day earlier, showered, eaten, slept and come back. He was in the crowd. So was most of the field. ‘Anyone can run fast when everything goes right,’ he told me as we watched her headtorch bobbing down the final hill. ‘She’s been out there all night and through another day. That’s a different sport.’
It is hard to describe what a hundred miles of moorland does to a body. There is the climbing, more than 4,000 metres of it, roughly half the height of Everest. There is the peat, which swallows a leg to the knee without warning. And there is the weather. On Saturday night a storm swept over the tops, and the temperature fell to two degrees. Rain came sideways. Runners who were far fitter than Rosalie sat down in the checkpoint tents, wrapped themselves in foil blankets and quietly handed in their numbers.
Rosalie did not. At the seventy-mile checkpoint, at three in the morning, a medic found her shaking so hard that she could not undo her own zip. He gave her soup, a dry fleece and twenty minutes. Then he asked whether she wanted to carry on. ‘I said I’d come this far, so I might as well see the rest of it,’ she told me later, as though she had been asked whether she wanted a second biscuit.
She began running four years ago, after her husband’s death, because, she says, ‘the house was too quiet and the hills weren’t’. Her first race was a five-kilometre fun run, which she walked half of. Her training for this one was fitted around six o’clock starts in the school kitchen: hill repeats on the slag heap behind the estate, long runs on Saturdays and, every evening, forty minutes on her late husband’s exercise bike in the spare room.
None of this makes her a natural athlete. What it makes her is stubborn, in the best sense of the word. For the final twenty miles her feet were blistered from heel to toe, and every downhill step, she admits, felt ‘like walking on drawing pins’. She kept going by counting: a hundred steps running, a hundred walking, over and over, all the way down from the moor.
Races like this one hand out trophies to the fastest. Perhaps they should hand one out to the last. Because when Rosalie finally straightened up in that car park, and the race director hung the medal round her neck, the people cheering loudest were the ones who had not made it.
Rosalie Ashworth’s last-place finish is described as the bravest performance of the race. How does the writer try to show this?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.