British Fell Relays 19/10/14
I helped Gareth Briggs organise the Fell Relay teams this year. We decided to opted for three teams, maybe in retrospect we should of stuck to two. However we wanted to encourage the growth of fell running in the club. And to an extent that did work. We opted for one vets team, and two open teams.
We all decided to travel up on the day, which was fine apart from Alison got a puncture on the way up in her car. Which delayed there arrival a little.
After setting up the tent, getting numbers and tags etc we went for a warm up. It's hard to do this, as it's relays, some people would be running off straight away others would have to wait until the afternoon.
I was in the third team and running with James Oddy in the pairs leg. We were second in the relay. Tracy was the first in a solo leg (5 miles), us second (10-12miles), then Alison in the Navigation leg with Dave Edge (10 miles) and George Lamplough on the last solo leg about (5 miles).
I not sure what happened with the other legs, as I only saw people come in. So I just describe ours.
We set off chasing the other teams and the first 300metres in the first field was already muddy from the first leg which made the early running tough. I tried to stay with James as much as possible but he was determined to make up some places, which we were doing. We hit the first climb, which was tough, as it dragged on and it was runnable so we had no chance of catching our breath. we then hit the ridge which had more rolling hills, again all runnable, again we tried to catch our breath. After a quick regroup at the checkpoint we headed down a descent through some heather and lose stones, then ran along the edge of a cliff, this can only be describe as running along a knifes edge. We then went down the steepest part of the descent, I took this nice and steady, as I wanted to save my legs and because am not as confident as James on the descents he was flying. After a long and leg aching descent we had to climb back up the steepest part of the course. It was a killer. the wind was coming in from the side, trying its best to pull us to the bottom of the hill. A chance to eat jelly babies and chance to get our breath. James did the same, we climb and made places up. The Clag was coming in, and it was harder to see the course and the direction of the other runners. After the howling wind failed to stop our attempts to the top of the hill we reached the next checkpoint with zero visibility. I had to get the map out to start to figure out the route to next checkpoint was. This is something am not very skilled at, so I took my time, before settling on the route. We stayed running on the edge of hill and followed the contours parallel with stream. We then went down hill to the next checkpoint. That route came at a price and James had hurt his ankle and I had hurt my hand falling in the stream to the check point. James determined to carry on, wanted to get moving, we did after I looked at the map and settle on the best way back. We did this and stuck to route, though both of our feet were worse for ware. We lost some places as we had to slow down, a run into the finish and we were done. That was hard work, but we managed to do it as a team. James did extremely well as he came in to cover someone who dropped out due to an injury and he was only just getting back to fittness after an injury himself.
| 174th | Tracy Dean | Staffordshire Moorlands AC - B | Open | Fell Relay | 01:01:11 |
| 97th | David Bethell/James Oddy | Staffordshire Moorlands AC - B | Open | Fell Relay | 01:43:13 |
| 162nd | David Edge/Alison Wainwright | Staffordshire Moorlands AC - B | Open | Fell Relay | 01:39:05 |
| 166th | George Lamplough | Staffordshire Moorlands AC - B | Open | Fell Relay | 01:05:58 |
Team Results
| Our Team 136th | 05:29:27 | 202 | Staffordshire Moorlands AC - B | Open |
| 89th | 04:56:06 | 201 | Staffordshire Moorlands AC - A | Open |
Max Wainwright/James Wood/Jason Burgess/Ian Ankers/Mark Platts/Rebecca Neill
| 52nd | 04:36:32 | 200 | Staffordshire Moorlands AC | Male V40 | 00:53:13 |
Martin Dearden/Craig Jeffery/Gareth Briggs/Anthony Bethell/Jonathon Whilock/Robin Hope
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