There was a quieter start to the week as ‘junior training’ is on it’s holidays for a couple of weeks. So the first club event of the week, and many would say the main event of the week, was The Chairman’s Challenge or Huw’s annual experience of being ‘the hunted’. Despite doing the handicap himself, Huw underestimated many folk’s form and near perfect running conditions (no mud this year). So 20 of us came in ahead of Huw (who was pushed to the finish by a fast finishing Kelly) and that included a couple of folk that took unintended diversions through the woods! It was great to see a walking group also. With a big thank you to Huw, Liza organising food, Mike and Clare for checking us out and in and most importantly Theresa and her family for letting us run through their farm and with Anna marking the course and lastly to all the runners and walkers for coming out to take on the challenge.
The results are:
These results together with results from previous editions can be found on the website https://www.croftambreyrunningclub.co.uk/news/chairmans-challenge-the-stats/
I realised we didn’t get a photo of everyone outside the pub so here are some snaps of those who stayed to eat together with some snaps from out on the course.
Thursday training was led by Nina at Brampton Bryan. It was a session of long intervals using the trees as distance markers. The session finished with a hilly ‘Indian File’ which according to Huw was ‘challenging’!.
Very early on Saturday morning, before many of us were up, Emma Jones Snr set off on the Southern Upland Way Ultra from Portpatrick on the West Coast of Scotland to Cockburnspath on the east coast (the finish is actually an agonising mile or so inland from Pease Bay). This is some 215 miles with 7200 meters of climb and a time limit of 100 hours. As many of you know Emma is doing this to raise money for Mountain Rescue. At the time of writing this report on the morning of Monday 10 August Emma was some 141 miles in and heading towards St Mary’s Loch (section 13 of the map below) and lying 26th overall – an incredible achievement already and on track for a high ranking finish tomorrow lunchtime.
You can follow Emma’s progress here.
Also making an early start on Saturday were Hannah Fletcher and Claire Thomas (Ludlow) ran the 89 miles from Barmouth Beach to Clee Hill Rugby Club raising funds for Help for Heroes and Clee Hill Rugby Club. They finished late Saturday night. Well done ladies a fantastic and tough challenge.
Even further afield Tim Jones was setting off on his next Alpine adventure with the Ticino Wildlands 500 in Switzerland – yes that’s 500km with an estimated 40,000m of elevation. Unfortunately it didn’t go to plan and in Tim’s words “For anyone that was dot watching. You may have noticed that things didn’t go well. I suspected that I was brewing a cold when I woke up at 4am on race day but hoped that I was wrong or that I could sweat it out. I was wrong on both counts.I think it is actually and throat or chest infection and by evening I was finding breathing harder at 1200m than it should have been at 2500m. You cannot outrun infections, I finally ground to a very slow halt after 43km of great wild and technical terrain at 2am this morning. There was no way that I was getting back above 2000m and performing well, so I chose to stop whilst I could still self evacuate back to the nearest road. It is a truly great race over very technical terrain in truly wild country with few distinct paths. A true mountain challenge, I need to consider very carefully whether I come back here in future or adopt the wise choice of consolidating at the 300 to 400km race distance.”
Saturday is of course parkrun day….and the inaugural run at Mortimer Forest parkrun (the one we all knew as Ludlow until Forestry England requested a name change). Reading many of the comments on Facebook after this name change was announced it’s clear some folk are happy with change and others not so much. But the reality is, whatever your views, it’s the same 5,000m of ups and downs in a wonderful forest setting and how lucky we are to have it on our doorstep. ….it certainly didn’t deter anyone as there were 165 runners on Saturday with 16 Sky Blues. Jamie Symonds was race Director with Tori Dickinson, & Tim Symonds helping on set up and Clare Preece, Nigel Taylor, Angus Kirby and Guy Whitmarsh marshalling. The results are below with a shout-out to Karen Coffey and Christina La Monica achieving PBs.
Talking of PBs Steve Partridge (21:00) and Oli Cameron-Swan (26:14) both set theirs at the Hay Riverside Parkrun. Simon Norwood completed the trio with his first run over the course. Sam Juson was the sole club runner at Hereford and Mike Hayward the sole club runner at Queenswood. Further afield Gwen, Vanessa and Jim Bowers ran at Tamar Lake near Bude and Bryan Davies was at Newent.
On Sunday Neil Taylor and Miles Davies were the only Sky Blues over at Clun for Runningmonk’s ‘Into the Woods’ 10k. Miles was 8th overall and both won their age categories – Miles VM55 and Neil VM65 – great running.
On Sunday evening Eric & Bron and Saffi were running at Caerphilly. Eric and Saffi ran the Welsh 5k Championship race and Bron the Open 5k. Advertised as a fast flat 3 lap course around the castle both commented that it wasn’t flat (clue’s in the name?) but all ran brilliantly. Eric was 15th overall and 3rd in his age (M30-34) in an international field. Saffi ran 20:58 and was 7th Junior Female. Bron came in at 27:07 and 130th in a field of 701.
