The race starts and finishes in Forres and follows the Dava Way, the Speyside way and the Moray Coast Trail.
I volunteered to run for my original running club back in about March on the assumption that they would either get tons of volunteers and I would be able to easily step aside to 'let' someone else run or they wouldn't get enough and they would give it up. In the end they had 11 and then with about a week to go one pulled out and my easy weekend went with him. But after Knockburn Sprint I was keen to get back into a race sooner rather than later. I was sure I was in better form than Knockburn had shown and a run-only race was the ideal opportunity to confirm it without the complications of trying to figure out which sport wasn't working.
Fortunately I did get a 'short' leg of only 8.8 miles. Unlike a traditional baton passing relay it is arranged so that each leg starts on the hour mark. This makes it much easier for organising and officiating as the gaps that might grow between strong and weak teams are effectively reset at the start of each leg. The times for all the legs are collated at the end. This has the added bonus that you can't really be sure who is winning overall at any point through the day so everyone has to run hard on their leg. It also meant that I knew exactly where and when to be at my start point. This had the usual effect of me turning up way too early and spending the first 10 minutes wondering if I was in the wrong place as no-one else was about.
Fortunately the other races and some associated crews started to turn up then and I could get on with warming up and catching up with some people that I haven't had a chance to chat with for a couple of years before getting ready to race.
At the start there were a lot of midges going about. The race briefing took place right in the midst of a large swarm of them. The briefing is basically, 'You are going 9 miles that way, stay on the Dava Way. There are some gates, close them as you pass. And remember it is a public route so you have no more right to it than any other user, so be polite to any that you do meet.' which is a fairly standard briefing for a trail race. As we were being briefed the first few runners from leg 1 were arriving having covered their 10-mile sections and my incoming runner came in in third place just seconds before the start of my leg.
I suppose I had better get on with actually writing about how the running part went. I had jogged the first quarter mile as my warm up so I knew it twisted a bit through the forest so I lurked around in the middle of the pack as we started and settled into a comfortable pace as I watched the leaders shoot off into the distance.
A pair of chatty girls from Inverness Harriers and Hunters Bog Trotters were hogging the path just in front of me and early on I thought maybe they were a bit slow. I decided to just settle in behind them for a while until we got moving and then if I really wanted to up the pace I could overtake on a wider part or squeeze between them. As it turned out their chattiness was just keeping them at the right pace for me to sit comfortably behind them for the first two miles. i couldn't really tell if they had upped the pace till they were uncomfortable or if they had just run out of gossip but they chat seemed to die out at this point. I had decided that this was a pace I could live with and if I still felt good later I could maybe push on.
Then we arrived at the first gate. As a group of three one girl opened the gate, the next one popped through, I followed and turned round to close the gate…. and missed. So I had to take a couple of seconds to grab the gate again and close it properly. And when I turned round there was a 15 meter gap. I go back to running thinking the gap would disappear and I would be back with them quickly, but it seems their reduction in chat was due to their increase in work rate and I couldn't close the gap. But it wasn't really getting any bigger, until the next gate came at about 2.5 miles. Now they had the advantage that one of them opened it and the other one closed it while I had to do both jobs. and another 15 meters of space appeared. And now the gap was big enough to 'break the elastic' and they started to sneak away a little bit.
The pair of them were never really gaining much but the little bits were adding up at each gate and then at about the 5 mile mark I had a shoelace come undone. The wet heather and gorse at the sides of the paths had loosened my double knot so I had to stop quickly to re-tie it. This gave the runner behind me the chance to catch up and gave the girls enough of a gap that I could just about keep them in sight on the straighter sections of the course. But inside I knew I wasn't really racing them any more and my knew companion was the race I was in.
We chatted away for a bit and he told me he was from Lossie and was a relative beginner at running, I was tempted to point out that I was coming up for 25 years but I figured that was more likely to scare me than him so I kept it to myself. When we came to a longer straight and then I realised that we had closed slightly on the girls despite chatting. So I decided to try and drop him and chase them down again. They rounded a corner and went out of sight and then as we came round the corner there is a sign with two arrows. one has Dava Way and a picture of a horse and a walker, the other says Dava Way - CYCLISTS THIS WAY in a very demanding font. I went with the horse/walker arrow but about 20 metres in I looked down and saw the girls had gone the other way and dropped down onto the road. In my gut I felt that was wrong but maybe they had recced the course better than me so I doubled back to follow them, and gave up the 40 meters I had made on my new pal as he reached the turn just as I got back to it.
I decided to just stick with him for the little stretch along the road just because it felt a bit safer running as a pair on the road. About a quarter of a mile up we turned back off the road and back up onto the path. I should have stayed on the path. It does shrink down to a single file walking track through the trees but it does go through the middle. As we were back up onto the path it stretches out to a long straight and we could see the pair of girls again. I made a couple of attempts to break away again and as we passed through 8 miles I had enough that I couldn't hear his steps on the gravel. It was too rough underfoot to look round but I thought I was away from him.
My legs were really starting to suffer now though and I was trying to figure out if I had enough to pick up and try to close the gap in front when I started hearing the crunches behind me. And they were getting closer fast. For a minute I thought it was maybe someone else who had started late or was just out for a run on their own but it turned out to be Mr Lossie again. He was really motoring now. As he passed I tried to stay with him but I didn't have anything left in the tank. I could see the finish and I picked up everything I had to try and put in a sprint to catch him but all I could do was hold the gap through the finish.
With the little detour in, garmin logged 9.1 miles. My longest single run of the year. And also 625 ft of climbing on a leg which was almost entirely on a gentle rise. I finished in 1 hour 8 mins 57. I am pretty happy with that. It is only just slower than my current 10k race pace and given the uphill, the gates, the surface and the muggy weather may actually be real-terms faster than my Moray 10k performance that I was so pleased with.
So all in I am really happy with my race.
As a team we placed fourth out of the 14 teams, so I am also really happy about that.
Anyway, I noted earlier that your team can be made up of up to 10 runners, because most teams will have the odd person drop out, so maybe you run out of substitutes and someone has to double-up and run a second leg or something. Or maybe because you are a completely bonkers pair of ultra runners who decide to take alternate legs for the entire 95 miles! That is right, two guys from Hunters Bog Trotters took alternate legs, running almost 43 miles each. And not only did one of them beat me on my leg which is not really a huge feat in the grand scheme of things, the pair of them kept beating people all day and eventually came second overall!
Out of the 14 teams only one team failed to finish all 10 legs. Here are the final results:
1. Forres Harriers 11h.27m33
2. Half Baked 2some 11.47.56
3. HBT 12.03.41
4. MRR 12.17.19
5. Inv Harriers 12.23.59
6. Garioch RR 13.12.22
7. Keith A 13.34.13
8. Forres H Ladies 14.33.23
9. Keith B 14.39.07
10. RAF Lossie 14.45
11. MRR Ladies 15.58
12. Easier Said Than Run 18.07.14
13. Burghead Coastal Rowers (walkers)
14. HHR 11.22 (9 legs complete)
Next Race - Forres Novice Triathlon - June 21st.
No comments:
Post a Comment