Tommy Price Finished the Bob Graham Round Four Years After a Cardiac Arrest on Its First Leg

Tommy Price came down off his 42nd peak and back to the Moot Hall in Keswick on Sept. 6, round the Bob Graham in 23 hours and 35 minutes with 25 minutes to spare on the limit. John Ferris had come to see him in. Ferris is a doctor with Keswick Mountain Rescue Team, and the last time he was with Price on a Lakeland hill, in January 2022, he traveled with him in a coastguard helicopter to Newcastle after Price’s heart stopped on the first leg of this same route.

Jonny Hulme was one of the rescuers who got to Price that night. This time he ran the opening leg alongside him.

“Four years ago, these people were helping save my life,” Price said in the team’s statement. “Four years later, they were there as I completed the challenge I had been recceing when it all happened.”

The Night on Hall’s Fell

It was Jan. 6, 2022, and Price was 26, out scouting the route he meant to attempt later that year. Leg one crosses Skiddaw and Great Calva before Blencathra, then comes off the mountain down Hall’s Fell, a narrow rocky ridge that runs into Threlkeld. There was snow on it, the wind was up, the temperature was well below freezing, and somewhere on that descent Price stopped being able to move. The friend he was with got him into a survival bag and went down for help.

The team that walked up expected to find a cold runner who had run out of fuel. Price was further up than that, lying face down, not responding. His heart had stopped and he was down to 18 C, roughly half the temperature a body should hold. (Coverage in 2022 put it at 18.8 C.)

They worked on him for more than two hours. Mountain rescue medicine runs on a rule the team quoted afterward, that “a casualty is not dead until they are warm and dead,” so they kept going: CPR without a break, three attempts to shock his heart back, then a flight with an HM Coastguard crew to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, where doctors ran his blood through an ECMO machine, circulating and oxygenating it outside his body while they rewarmed him.

Very few people come back from a reading like that. The coldest core temperature recorded in anyone who has survived accidental hypothermia with circulatory arrest is 13.7 C, a case published in The Lancet in 2000 that resuscitation researchers still cite, and Price was only about four degrees above it. Even with the machine the odds are thin. Survival across the 14,839 adult cases of ECMO CPR on the international registry runs at 30 percent.

Price has put the time he spent clinically dead at somewhere between two hours 14 minutes and three hours 20 minutes, and BASE Magazine reported in 2022 that he had been given a 2 percent chance. He was in intensive care for two weeks, part of it in an induced coma, and the nerve damage in his hands and feet never entirely went away. That October, nine months after the helicopter, he ran the London Marathon and raised around £10,000 for the team.

Twenty-Five Minutes in Hand

The round is 42 Lakeland summits, about 66 miles and 27,000 feet of climbing, out from the Moot Hall and back to it, and the Bob Graham 24 Hour Club will only ratify it if you are inside 24 hours with a witness on every top. Bob Graham kept a guest house in Keswick and was 42 himself when he did the 42 tops in a day in June 1932. Fewer than half the people who register get round: in 2025 the club logged 112 successes from 238 attempts.

The fast rounds get most of the attention. Jack Kuenzle took the record off Kilian Jornet in 2022 with 12:23:48, and in July Katharina Hartmuth brought the women’s mark down to 14:11:58. Those are summer rounds run by people who do this for a living. Price went round in September, on a body that has been through what his has, over the ground where it happened: Skiddaw, Great Calva, Blencathra, and then Hall’s Fell again, with Hulme beside him.

Keswick Mountain Rescue put a word of warning alongside the congratulations. Fell runners carry almost nothing, for the good reason that the running keeps them warm, and the danger arrives the moment the running stops, whether that is a rolled ankle, a wrong line in cloud or something like what happened to Price. A spare layer and a survival bag weigh next to nothing and will buy the hours a callout takes. The team is unpaid and runs on donations.

“I was given a second chance,” Price said. “This weekend, I made the most of it.”