Jenny Tough, SOLO - Interview, Book & Film Review

Jenny Tough, Solo Photo: Chris Christie SkyPilot

At the start of July I put together a programme of films for Love Trails festival, presenting a session a night in a sunny stretch tent on the Gower Peninsula, Wales. The festival combines non competitive trail running - excluding the beer mile, where the competition is taken VERY seriously - with a party-by-the-beach atmosphere of talks, live music, biodegradable glitter and vegan street food. Running is at the heart of Love Trails and Jenny Tough was one of the stars of the weekend, joining me on stage for a screening of her new film SOLO followed by Q&A with an overflowing and excited audience.

Jenny Tough is a professional adventurer. An endurance athlete, a writer, and a lover of exploring mountains alone. In 2016 Jenny completed the first of her epic travels on foot, running across the Tien Shan mountain range in Kyrgyzstan. In the years that followed she ran across a total of six of the world’s most challenging mountain ranges on six different continents. All unsupported, all solo. Her book, SOLO, is sometimes funny, sometimes gripping, always brutally honest. In person, Jenny is the same. A self-described introvert, she is the antithesis of the gnarly, bearded adventurer and yet she successfully propelled herself alone across some of the world’s harshest landscapes, both in terms of terrain and in attitudes to solo women.

The film of the book condenses six years of adventure into 35 minutes using self-shot footage from Jenny’s adventures, interviews as she reflects on her travels, and commentary from fellow ultra-endurance athlete and friend, Emily Chappell and Sidetracked magazine editor John Summerton, who provide context that Jenny is perhaps too modest to add to her own story.

The routes Jenny chose across mountain ranges like the Tien Shan in Kyrgyzstan, the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the Bolivian Andes are not established routes. If you just want to run a long way, there are far easier trails to follow, but I get the feeling that commitment and isolation is part of the challenge. Jenny agrees:

“Yes, going solo and unsupported comes with risks, but for me there’s also a level of integrity. I had to solve all the problems and that takes a lot of time and energy. To run at that level you have to eat quite a lot, find healthy food, navigate, find a place to sleep, think about how you are going to stay safe, and what you would do if you had a first aid issue. My first aid kit is duct tape! You've just got to get yourself to the finish. But, if you go solo you get to be so purely selfish. The day is entirely yours. So it has pluses and minuses.”

These days I’m often reluctant to ask female adventurers about their experiences as women. I want to be able move on from the gendered aspects of adventure, but in this case it’s inescapable. The experiences Jenny had were entirely different, and in some cases completely shaped by the fact that she was a solo female traveller. Jenny explains that:

“Solo women are treated like it can only be a negative experience, that it’s wildly dangerous, and also you're incapable so you probably shouldn't be there. If you’re a solo woman you face quite a lot of sexism, but there's this weird silver lining that everyone really takes care of you. A lot of the places I went, they were so scared I would hurt myself and so worried about me that I was overwhelmingly treated with hospitality. I was invited into so many houses.

“I was pursued across Morocco [by the Gendarmerie, or Berbers employed by them]. These men would catch up to me and block my trail and say ‘we just need to know where you're going and keep track of you because it's dangerous. This is all for your protection.’ If you're a lone woman out in the mountains or the desert being chased by any man, no matter where he says he works for, it’s not cool vibes. I didn't like it.

“One police chief, Hassan, took me out for coffee. I explained that where I come from, women can do whatever they want, we have freedom and independence. Then he told me his side of it. He said, ‘I've been a police chief for more than 20 years. I have three daughters around your age. I've seen the worst things that happen in my country and I wouldn't ever let my daughters go out by themselves because I can't handle the amount of fear.’ He explained to me that his perspective and all the men who chased me was just this really paternal protection. I couldn't hate them for it, but at the same time I was like - don't sit at my bivvy when I'm sleeping.”

Along with moments of negativity and sometimes overt sexism, there were moments of connection. I asked Jenny what it was like to gain a perspective on very different women’s lives:

“In villages the girls would get so excited and run outside to high five and meet me. They've probably not seen a woman run through their village. Being such a gender segregated country, a lot of the times the men would be out and the women would be at home. I would get invited into Berber households with just the women and have tea with the girls. These really beautiful things they would do gave me the motivation to keep marching forward in a place where the misogyny was just destroying me. I couldn't handle it a lot of the time but I just had to look for those little meaningful moments.”

Jenny has talked openly about her mental health, how she feels about her body and issues with eating. It's a vulnerable thing to do but it was important to her. I asked what the thinking was behind that:

“I started running when I was a teenager and it was from this dark and negative place when I just hated my body. Running was all about burning calories to lose weight, and there’s always going to be that layer of it in the way that I treat running. It shifted and now I get so much from running that has nothing to do with the way my body is going to end up looking. It’s good for mental health, good for exploring, good for community, but that narrative is always going to be there in the back of my mind - it's been there since I was a 14-year-old girl.

“It felt important to me to share that, because I don't think it's fair for me to get up on stage and tell you that I'm this amazing person that ran across six mountain ranges. That's true and I did have a really good time and I'm very proud of what I did, but that's not the full story. If there had been a woman in the running industry when I was 16 years old, who wasn't size 6 with visible abs, just talking about these things and showing us that you can still be a runner, that could have changed everything for me. I might not have gone down the road I went down.”

After reflecting on these serious subjects, the session moved on to Q&A from the audience, who had many questions! Jenny shared amusing anecdotes, and tips for survival in arid lands and bear country. Far too much to write up, but it’s all there in the book and I highly recommed reading it. Buy a copy from the Outdoorista book shop and I’ll receive a small proportion of the profit to help support my writing. SUBSCRIBE to my Outdoorista newsletter for more posts like this, straight to your inbox.

Resources

Buy Jenny Tough, SOLO: what running across mountains taught me about life

Follow Jenny Tough on Instagram @jennytough

Join us at Love Trails festival 11-14 July 2024

To learn more about healthy eating to support performance in sport read Renee McGregor’s More Fuel You: Understanding your body and how to fuel your adventures

The film Solo by Jenny Tough and Ellie Green at Summit Fever Media has just finished a UK tour and isn’t out on general release yet… I’ll let you know when it’s available.