Well, today was an eventful race to say the least! I guess it would be best to start from the beginning…
We went out for a pleasent walk in the woods yesterday afternoon, little did our youngest (Henry) know that he would be walking Round 3’s four mile course whilst I marked up the route with tape, so we managed to pull him away from his screen for some time outdoors. By the time we were two and a half miles in, he wasn’t the happiest of chappies and we had to think of ways to distract him and get him around the route! Thankfully the complaints were fairly minor and the promise of biscuits when he got home seemed to keep him going till home. Thankfully we got in just before the rain starting hammering down, whilst Rachel moaned about it, I was quite happy those trails would be nice and muddy for everyone. Anyway, two jobs in one, a nice family walk and course marked up all ready to go.
I went out in the morning for a scoot round the route and replaced any tape that had disapeared during the evening. It was fairly overcast when I headed out but by the time I had finished some glorious sun was lighting up the woods. It was shaping up to be a nice day!
I got up to the start line to start getting set up for 8am, I was soon joined by those our brilliant set of volunteers who helped me limp the kit into position ready. We had our usual marshalling positioning chat just as people started to arrive. It felt a bit busier today compared to the last round and all told we had 29 turn up out of the 46 signed up.
We started the race at 9am and always by this point, I have a little bit of a worry that I’ve marked the course well enough and that everyone is in position in the right places. So, I find it’s best to open the flask and pour out a cuppa and ruminate over it. At this point Rachel turned around to me and asked how long it would be until they started coming over. I told her the Sean would probably pop over the line not far over the 20 minute mark. She didn’t believe that he was that fast… He came over the line at 23:05, not even the slick mud can slow him down!
It’s always really good to see people coming in over the finishing line and cheering them through, but this time some of the people I was expecting over didn’t come in where I was expecting them to come in. The first time we noticed was when Rachel pointed out that Iris had not yet come over the line. Iris was heavily tipped to come in as the first lady, or at least pretty close to. Of course, this started to get us worried, we noticed a few more hadn’t come in yet and started the question if we’d missed a few. It was then when Mark Russell came across the line and someone shouted “where have you been Mark?” and he responded “I haven’t got a f*cking clue” that we realised that we may have a few people that had gone wondering. However, as they started to come back, we found out it wasn’t due to a poorly marked course, more like those people who had been following the person in front of them and weren’t looking for the tape. I don’t know, you guys, you complained last time that you couldn’t see the tape so I put out tape thats more visible and you don’t look at it! 🤣
It was fantastic to see a good turn out from the home club TeamBR, with 14 club members coming taking part and all holding the top 3 podium positions overall and the 2nd & 3rd in female gender category! Unfortunately, Iris came in at 44 minutes having done close to 10km, it will be tight for her to claim back her series podium position from Zoe…
More event piccies can be found here and round results here and if you want to see the overall series placings check here Well done to everyone that attended and particularly the volunteers who came and helped out! See you for the next round!
