When Gary Devine was picked to run for England, the manager took one look at him and asked: “You’re gonna represent your country looking like that?!” Devine had turned up with shocking pink hair, holes in his jeans, a worn out band T-shirt and unlaced Doc Martens. Not that such a punky image stopped him becoming British fell running champion, after a race up Ben Nevis, the UK’s tallest mountain, in 1990. “Years later the manager told us that Gary had changed his life,” smiles Debbie Devine, Gary’s wife and coach. “He said ‘I learned not to judge a book by its cover.’”
Thirty one years on, Devine’s wonderful and often very funny story is told in a new book, Faster! Louder! How a Punk Rocker from Yorkshire Became British Champion Fell Runner. Author Boff Whalley was previously vocalist/guitarist in Leeds anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba, but is a fell runner too. “I got into it after seeing Gary win a race and recognising him from punk gigs,” he says as we all convene on Zoom. “It made me think ‘I could do that’. But Gary’s story is more extreme than mine. It needed writing.”
Devine grew up in hilly Ilkley, where he thought it was “quite normal” to run up and down the moors. “There was a big running section at our school,” he explains. “About 40 or 50 of us would go out on a lunchtime.”
If it was an important race, I’d just have two or three pints in the pub the night before
He was still a schoolboy when a friend of a friend lent him Dead Kennedys’ 1980 Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables album, and his passions turned upside down. “A seminal moment in my life,” he grins. “It was a completely different world. I wanted to run,…
