A Keswick woman with a serious medical condition that requires her to walk with a crutch has completed a round of the Wainwright fells.
Thirty-four-year-old Sarah Ann Curran has refused to let her disability get in the way of getting out onto the fells and the completion of the 214 hills and mountains that feature in the pictorial guides written by legendary Lake District walker Alfred Wainwright has proved to be one of her pinnacle achievements.
When she was working for the RAF in personnel support at Marham, Norfolk, in 2015 she rolled her ankle and damaged the bone while doing a beep test. It involves participants running 20m back and forth, across a marked track, keeping time with the beeps to measure their aerobic fitness.
The injury meant she was medically discharged from the RAF in April 2019 due to the ankle condition which is called osteochondral defect.
She has twice had surgery on the ankle and is still undergoing treatment but needs a crutch to get around.
“When the injury first happened I sank into a depression,” said Sarah. “I ran all the time and could not run any more and I piled on a lot of weight.”
She started doing the Wainwrights in January 2017 while still on two crutches. Sarah was on holiday in the Lake District with her family and her father and mother encouraged her to accompany them up Loughrigg.
“It was really hard to describe how I felt but I thought doing the Wainwrights might be something I could do. I thought I might be able to get up a couple but I never envisaged that I would be able to complete them all.”
“I have bad days and better days. The pain that I feel at the moment is a dull chronic pain and I have pain all the time which I have medication for. But being out there on the fells and being active helps. All I think about is being on the mountain and being surrounded by beautiful scenery. I find it’s pain relief for me.”
Sarah managed to build her strength up and in 2019 had got rid of one of her crutches.
Her final Wainwright was Great Carrs which has the wreckage of Halifax bomber LL505 close to the summit. It came to grief on the fell on the night of October 22 1944 while the crew were undertaking a night navigation exercise.
“It was a real poignant moment being up there with that aircraft over Remembrance weekend because it fitted in with my background and my love of the RAF and the forces,” she said.
Sarah, who is originally from St Helen’s but moved to Keswick in August 2021 with her husband Leigh, used to be a 100m sprinter and had represented Merseyside.
When she started working for the RAF she represented her base in a couple of championship events.
She was a regular visitor to the Lakes and was around 15 when she first visited on a family holiday and met her husband in 2010 and made more frequent visits after that.
Her favourite of the Wainwright fells is Great Gable “because it’s so different from every angle and so iconic”. Her least favourite was Green Crag because of all the bogs.
In June Sarah also trekked the 112km Cumbria Way from Ulverston to Carlisle and has also hiked a marathon around Ullswater and raised around £1,000 for the Alzheimer’s Society and completed a marathon in Yorkshire and raised around £500 for mountain rescue.
Next year she is planning to complete a second round of the Wainwright fells starting in January and ending in December for the Alzheimer’s Society.
Visit her justgiving link at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/sarahanncurran
