Race review: Round Hill Fell race 10/8/2014

Bertha Be Damned

It's generally accepted that fell runners are mad, even by us fell runners ourselves, but when Bertha, formally known as hurricane, is staggering across the country like a Friday night drunk, it takes a special kind of mad to ignore it and set off to run 9 miles around the wild and exposed fells and bogs of Blubberhouses moor.

Nothing to worry about, just a bit of rain

So the weather forecast looked bad, in fact there was a weather warning out, but this didn't stop me from digging out all my waterproofs (That had been safely stored until winter- it's August the bloody 10th for crying out loud!) and heading off to Mike's (A fellow Fellandaler) with Debi "the camera" in tow.

We set off from my house in the rain. We arrived at Mike's in the rain. And it was raining when we got to race registration in the little hall in the tiny and very lovely village of Timble. Rain was the theme of the day. But hell, we'd known it would be all week. The little voice in my head put it very succinctly:

Suck it up, buttercup.

And so I did.

I paid the princely sum of 3 whole English pounds and received race number 114- I nearly gave it back and asked for 118, just for the craic. In the hall the Fellandalers were gathering in numbers; a very decent turnout of myself, Mike, Adrian, Simon, Phil S, Christine and Kathryn.
I was pleased to see that the race kit required was just a waterproof jacket- no need to carry all the rest then!

I'm sure you've guessed, but this is the race route and not your eyeball after a Friday night out.

On Monday evening we had reccied the race route in glorious weather and had taken time to enjoy the wonderful views of the Yorkshire countryside. What a contrast today was promising to be as the clouds and rain raced round the sky in a white-out. But buttercups don't mind the rain, so we set off from the hall for the start, a ten minute walk away. During the race I was very pleased to have been able to check out the race route before hand, as there's a couple of tricky places where it would have been easy to go wrong and indeed numerous people did on the day.

Well chaps, off you go then

As ever at a fell race, it got under way with a stark lack of to-do. Basically, the race director shouted "Go" And go we did.  I attempted to start strava on my phone but it refused due to wet fingers and I quickly stuffed it in to the "waterproof" pocket of my jacket (I pulled it out of the pocket at the end of the race, a proverbially drowned rat and it refused to work for hours afterwards to punish my neglect). My garmin GPS watch has sadly developed a terrible illness in that the battery contacts inside have corroded- annoying as it's supposed to be pretty waterproof, hence me trying to use my phone instead.

We trotted along a section of fairly hard track and this helped the field to string out as we passed through the woods, it being easy for each runner to adopt their fast pace.

A quick corner around High wood, through a fence and we were looking up at the first small hill. The race route has a total elevation of just over 1000ft, but spread over 9 miles, it's actually fairly gentle and the slope up to this "Summit" was quick and not really arduous, so it came as something of a surprise to suddenly be struggling as I descended. It felt like a weight had been attached to the bottom of my lungs making it difficult to suck air in. With my returning fitness I thought that my ability to recover on the easy sections in a race had returned, but it was now deserting me. My breathing was coming in double time. All that said, I managed to fly down the hill and over took several people and in the process took more out of myself than I really should have been doing.

At the bottom of the descent we hit the first, and certainly not the last, boggy section. The runner in front of me was small and slight and he lightly sprung over the bog. I wrongly assumed it must be very shallow mud, so I took off.....and when I landed my right leg disappeared up to the knee in mud. I quickly yanked myself out and carried on running, very grateful that my trainer had stayed on; I had thought before the race to tighten the knot on my shoelaces as much as I could.

Now the race became a battle to just keep moving with my misfiring lungs failing to provide me with adequate oxygen. All the while the rain gently, and not so gently continued to persistently precipitate like a frigging hose pipe. I was very glad to be running in my excellent, and expensive, Innov8 raceshell 220 jacket with a baseball cap to stop the rain from dripping in to my eyes. But it was only really cold comfort in the conditions.

I feared the turn around point at Round Hill itself would feel like a trek to the north pole, but it actually seemed to come fairly quickly, albeit it with some more bogs in between, but this time I managed to avoid any more impromptu mud baths.

Oddly, this graph makes it look harder than it was!

Now we were heading downwards along reasonably stable trods. I could see a pack of runners maybe 100 metres in front of me and I did my best to keep them in sight; it would save me from getting horribly lost- especially as I wasn't totally sure that our reccy had finished the race correctly. Anyways, I often run in a weird sort of runner's Bermuda triangle whereby I end up almost entirely on my own- no one in front or behind of me for a long way. In fact, it happens so often I am beginning to get paranoid about it. Maybe I'll change my deodorant.

Runner's Nipple is no Laughing Matter.

Sometime on this down hill section I realised that the carefully cut and stuck plaster over my right nipple, wasn't as carefully cut and stuck as I'd thought and now my soaking wet clothing was attempting to file the end of said nipple right off. Ah well, we're tough us fell runners you know. I could cry about it later.

Soon we came to the climb up to the hunting lodge but just before we arrived at the turn, I came across Adrian who was stopped at the side of the path. I shouted out to ask him if he was alright, "Yeah, just thrown up a few times" he said, casually. Adrian has steel running through his veins and no matter what has befallen him, he doesn't ever complain, he may, however, state it as a matter of fact, thusly: "I've broken my legs, but it's ok, I'll just carry on a bit slower"
As I made my way up to the hunting lodge I passed one runner who was clearly struggling with the climb and another runner who clearly wasn't, flew past me. By this point, there was very little jockeying for position.

Down another small valley, across some very slippery wooden "bridges" then up the final ascent; quite a viscous little one and we hit the last track to take us to the finish.

I was moving so fast at this point that Debi only just got me in the shot. Not

And finally, in I trotted in 42nd position out of 112 runners with screaming calves and a bleeding nipple.
It's probably all worth it though, right?

I managed to cheer in a few of the other Fellandalers and asked Adrian how he was (He swapped his usual 1st Fellandaler position for a 4th due to his illness then headed off for an afternoon at Tropical world!!) before I got too cold and had to head back to the car. Adrian was soon fine, by the way.

By the time I headed back to see Debi, who had spent two hours in the cold taking photographs of the runners, she was absolutely freezing, so for once we didn't stick around for the prize giving.

So all in all, I was annoyed that with my current fitness, I could have finished a few minutes quicker had I prepared better (Or in fact, prepared at all) and with last September's fitness I might even have sneaked in to the top 20. I also very much learned not to eat a 12" pizza at 10pm the night before a race and that I am slowly, slowly returning to form and also, that Bertha, is my bitch.