After sustaining knee and shoulder injuries on day two, race leader Simon Roberts was unable to continue, while Laura O’Driscoll slowed after sustaining an ankle injury during the 68km and over 2,300m of ascent from Kinloch Hourn to Achnashellach. The new overall leader is Graham Walton, while Despina Berdeni is in first place in the women’s race.

Crossing a river on day three of CWU2022 - Photo © Cape Wrath Ultra No Limits Photography

Simon Roberts commented: “After all that hard technical running we had to do yesterday, lots of bog, steep descents, I fell over on a nice flat piece of forestry trail. Just tripped over my foot. It was a stupid fall, but I damaged my knee and shoulder. So, I’m not going to start today unfortunately. I was loving the adventure so far. I had a small taste of the Highlands so I am really gutted I’m not going to see the rest of it.”

Laura O’Driscoll completed the day, but after hurting her ankle, was not confident that she would be able to start day four: “You never know, miracles could happen… it was a good day apart from that. It happened at about 30km, but then it got progressively worse, obviously from running on it. I’m just raging. I would have loved to race that – it was such a nice course.”

The day three campsite was at the end of the rainbow on day three of CWU2022 - Photo ©  Cape Wrath Ultra No Limits Photography

Elsewhere in the field, sole Ukrainian runner Andrey Prihodko continued to make good progress, but the race was taking its toll, and more runners dropped out.

After day three of the 2022 Cape Wrath Ultra, the leading runners are:

Male

1^st Graham Walton (20:53:29)

2^nd Thomas Øderud (20:53:55)

3^rd David Barry (21:16:45)

Female

1^st Despina Berdeni (21:43:26) – fifth overall

2^nd Laura O’Driscoll (21:56:55) – sixth overall

3^rd Vicky Savage (24:28:08).

A round up of the day’s action is available on the event website - Day 3: all to play for with 2 frontrunners possibly out of the race — Cape Wrath Ultra®.