Jamie Ramsay – Running Belhaven & the Americas!
On Friday 10 October, Belhaven Hill School welcomed adventurer and former pupil Jamie Ramsay back to his old school to open our inaugural ‘Wellbeing Weekend’.
Jamie ran with over 100 pupils before joining them for tea and then talking to an audience of over 160 about his experience in ‘Running the Americas’ and his belief in the power of physical challenge as an antidote to mental ill health.
In 2013, Jamie Ramsay decided that he had had enough of working in finance. Having followed his peers, rather than his dreams into the City, he looked at his 35-year-old self and wondered how he could escape. He went to meet Henry Fletcher, an old friend from Belhaven, and as they reminisced about the adventures that they had both enjoyed as boarders in the early 90s, he realised that the Belhaven Run might possibly hold the answer.
As a renowned ‘walker’, it had taken quite some encouragement from Mr. C to get Ramsay to the front of the pack of the weekly run, but by the time he left Belhaven for Loretto in 1993, Jamie had fallen in love with running. His passion gave him the confidence to plan an audacious adventure 20 years later. Having looked at various options with ‘Mr. Fletcher’, he realised that the best option to meet his ambitions would be an unsupported run from Vancouver to Buenos Aires – a journey of 17,000km, designed to finish on New Year’s Eve 2014.
Just over a decade later, Jamie runs ‘Ramsay Adventure’ and has now completed 54,000km under his own steam. He speaks brilliantly, weaving humour and pathos into stories that scale the peaks and troughs of elation and despair, mixing the thrills of sledging at 60km/h down a Venezuelan volcano with the misery of injury and illness, the loneliness of an empty stretch with the solitude of a beautiful expanse – these were important and complex ideas, sensitively delivered to an audience that hung on his every word.
Jamie had spent an hour before the talk running with the children as he completed two laps of the Belhaven run with his trusty stroller, and he spent another hour after his talk, answering questions, signing copies of his book, ‘Running the Americas’ and chatting to parents.
As the opening event of our Wellbeing Weekend, we could not have hoped for a better introduction: an OB achieving something remarkable having been inspired to rediscover the passion of his childhood. In an age of instant gratification and decreasing physical activity, this was a great boost to our encouragement towards a healthy body and a healthy mind.
