This summer, I climbed every mountain in Ireland - 275 peaks in 50 days, 5 hours, and 45 minutes, taking 5 days off the previous record set by James Forrest.
Since finishing the Vandeleur-Lynams Mountain Project I’ve got to do some really nice interviews and podcast chats about the project. Below, you’ll find the links to where you can read and listen back, and some reflections on certain questions that I’ve kept thinking about since the interviews.
Outsider’s Hero of the Week
“Ellie Berry Climbed Every Mountain In Ireland: Hero of the Week”
Ellie Berry of Tough Soles has set a new speed record for climbing every mountain in Ireland. Ellie (29) spent her summer climbing all 275 mountains on the Vandeleur-Lynams list. The Tipperary woman took 50 days, 5 hours, and 45 minutes to complete the list, beating the previous record by 6 days. Ellie is no stranger to epic challenges however. Along with her partner Carl Lange, she completed all 42 National Waymarked Trails in Ireland between 2017 and 2019, totalling 4,000km.
When Matt messaged me asking if I’d be interested in doing an interview on Outsider about the project, I was delighted - I know that he and the team at Outsider put a lot of consideration into the stories they share on the website.
One of the first questions he asked me was “why? - why climb every mountain in Ireland?”. After all the time I’d spent thinking about the project while trudging through bog or striding across shale-scattered mountains, this question had never occurred to me.
When the opportunity to do the Vandeleur-Lynams Project came around, there wasn’t a moment of stopping to ask “why”, it simply felt like I was being offered this chance, and I jumped at it. Carl and I started Tough Soles in 2017, when we literally handed back our apartment keys and started walking. For me, it was all spurred by my deep love of being outside, seeing new places, making every week feel like it was a month long.
Throughout the intervening six years, the “why” has never really changed, and has become so ingrained in my life that I sometimes forget it.
I feel like there should be some big reason or important moment that started this [the Vandeleur-Lynams] project. But the simple answer is that I really love the outdoors, and this was just another possible project idea that would have me out in the mountains for most of the summer!
Looking at my answer to this question now, it is true - but it feels lacking in some way. The sentiment is right, I know that my love for being outside in any capacity is what grounds me and makes me the most happy. But I feel like I still need to find the right way to say it - find the poetic elegance that might capture how much being outside means to me, without making it feel over dramatic.
I couldn’t have imagined a better way of spending those two months this summer. I felt so lucky to have had the chance to it - that Carl and I had saved enough so we could take two months off from work, and that Carl was willing to be my support crew for all that time. In a way, it feels like a “luck” that was both given to me, but that we worked for.
I think I was on my last day in the Mournes (day 22) when the rain truly set in – the rain that was going to haunt the rest of this project.
Your life shrinks to the really simple things when you’re on adventures like this. Life is stripped back to sleeping, walking, eating and recovering. Your world is your gear, the landscape, and the weather. And the weather was just bad.
It feels very Irish for the biggest hurdle of this project to have been the rain - but here we are. While June was sticky and hot, July was then the wettest July on record, and there were several moments where I was almost washed away, literally and emotionally.
Bad weather slows everything down: moving through it is harder; it takes more mental energy to make sure you’re going the right way; when you finish a day you’ve to spend more time cleaning and organising your gear so that it’s in a (somewhat) fit state to be used again tomorrow; and then you just need more sleep to recover from the extra energy you spent.
One small positive side to the bad weather conditions was that, on some of the days where I couldn’t see what was ahead of me, I was calmer climbing the big mountains. In many ways, this whole project was an exercise in self-belief.
Read the whole Outsider article here.
No Finish Line Podcast with John O’Regan
I think I first came across John O’Regan many years ago, when I worked as a sales assistant in Great Outdoors in Dublin. He would come in to get equipment for his training and adventures, and a whisper would ripple through the shop staff that one of Ireland’s top runners was in. I don’t think we ever crossed paths in those moments, but the awe stayed with me.
An Irish international ultra runner, he’s represented Ireland on the national team at World & European level, and has completed in some of the most extreme races from arctic to desert - including racing at the North Pole. Recently, I’ve seen John run as a guide runner with blind athlete Sinead Kane, completing a marathon on each of the seven continents in less than seven days, and the Trans Sahara Marathon (140km across 4 stages).
This August, I got to sit down and record an episode with John his Podcast - The No Finish Line Podcast. Having listened to the podcast for a few years, I knew that the conversations usually go deep into topics and explore areas that you might not usually hear on other podcasts - which stands to the breath of research that John does before each episode. For our conversation, we talked about the Vandeleur-Lynams, Tough Soles, Leave No Trace, and how it all links my artistic practice - an area I didn’t expect our conversation to go to.
Post Vandeleur-Lynams Video Debrief
Coffee with Tough Soles
As we often do, Carl and I brewed some coffee, sat down, and got chatting about our recent adventures.
It was nice to film this together, as this project really was a team effort. While I may be the one that gets to put their name to the record, I could not have done it alone. Carl was my one-stop-crew-shop: he drove us between mountains, did route finding research and made the GPX files for every day I was out there, and forced a protein shake into my hand each time I made it back to the car.
He’s also the reason I actually broke the record. During that last week, when the rain just would not stop, and the exhaustion was high, Carl knew I had the record at my finger tips and kept pushing me out of the car. At that point, I would have happily stopped, I had climbed through enough rain. If I’d been alone, I wonder would I have waited (in vain) for the weather to clear, and in that wasted precious days.
Watch the video here.
The Hiiker Podcast with Eoin Hamilton
Ireland is a small country. You can pretty much drive from one end of the country to the other in less than a day. But this small Island off the west coast of Europe, is packed with some of the most beautiful and rugged landscapes in the world. Our little Island has 275 mountains according to the Vandeleur-Lynams scale, which classifies a mountain as being over 600m in elevation and 15m prominence. While bagging all of these peaks is not as widely spoken about as say the Munroes in Scotland, or the Wainwrights in the Lake District or the 14ers in the US, there are a number of people who have managed to scale all 275. My guest this week, Ellie Berry, not only ticked off all 275, but managed to do it in a new record time of 50 days and 5 hours! Beating the previous record by almost 5 days.
Eoin is one of my favourite podcast interviewers - through the Hiiker podcast, he brings on guests that represent the vast variety of amazing people that make up the outdoor community, passing the mic to underrepresented voices, and ensuring plenty of laughs and smiles along the way.
Carl and I first spoke on the Hiiker Podcast back in Season 1 back in 2020, where we talked about walking every National Waymarked Trail in Ireland.
It was an absolute pleasure to be back on again - we really focused on the project itself, discussing “what is a mountain” (and how lists of mountains change over time), why do we push ourselves with such challenges, the mental struggles that come with challenging yourself, and the logistics of travelling around for two months!