Every morning at half past five, rain or not.
It is 5.28am, black and drizzling, and twenty-three people in head torches are stretching against the railings by the harbour wall. Some are in club vests, most in whatever they could find in the dark. Nobody is chatting much. At precisely half past, a short woman in a yellow jacket checks her watch, says “Right then,” and the group sets off along the quay towards the lighthouse at a steady jog, their lights bobbing over the wet stone.
The woman is Sunniva Haldane, fifty-four, a former district nurse who founded the Harbour Runners eight years ago with three colleagues from the night shift at the infirmary. They wanted to run, but their hours made evening club sessions impossible. So they met at the harbour at half past five, before the morning shift, and ran a loop of the docks and back. They have done so every weekday since, and the group now has more than 140 members, of whom around twenty to forty turn up on any given morning.
The rules
There are very few. The group runs at 5.30, rain or not – Haldane has cancelled only for snow and once for a bomb disposal operation on the quay. Nobody is left behind: the fastest runners loop back to collect the slowest at each of three turning points. Head torches and reflective bands are compulsory from October to March. And there is no charge, no membership form and no official website, only a group chat and a whiteboard in the window of the harbour café that opens at 6.30 for the runners alone.
The route is just under 8km: out along the quay to the lighthouse on the breakwater, back past the fish market as the first boats unload, up the steps by the customs house and along the canal towpath before dropping back to the harbour. On Fridays they add a hill, which nobody enjoys.
“When you start, it is the worst part of your day. After a month it is the best part. You have seen the sunrise, or at least the rain, and you have done something hard before anyone has asked anything of you.”
Haldane says she has watched dozens of people go from walking the route to racing it. Several members have since run marathons; one, a postman named Callum Iredale, finished in the top fifty at the regional championships last spring, two years after his first morning on the quay.
Who comes, and why
The membership looks like the city at that hour: nurses and cleaners coming off nights, bakers on their way to work, students who have not been to bed, a few office workers who want to be home before their children wake. There is a retired harbour master who walks the course with a flask of coffee and a sixteen-year-old who wants to run for Calder at the schools’ championships. Several members say they joined after a bereavement or a divorce and stayed because nobody asked questions.
Fishermen on the quay now wave as the lights go past, and the café owner, Nadim Sarraf, keeps the radiators on early in winter. He says the runners have become his best customers: thirty bacon rolls by quarter to seven most days.
There have been challenges. Last winter the harbour authority briefly proposed closing the quay to the public before 7am for security reasons, and the group gathered 2,000 signatures in a week. The decision was reversed. Haldane now meets the authority twice a year to discuss lighting and safety.
By 6.20 the group is back at the railings, steaming in the drizzle. The sky over the headland has turned from black to dark blue. Somebody calls out the time for the loop. Somebody else complains about the hill, even though it is only Tuesday. Then they scatter – to hospitals, ovens, lecture halls and buses – and the harbour goes back to belonging to the gulls.
