It's been a challenging week with plenty of cancellations including numerous local parkruns and the final race of the PECO season at Roundhay. This didn't impact some of our members running in warmer climate with kit man Si taking on the Benidorm Half.
Elsewhere we had the rare occurrence of a midweek race with t'other Simon & Jo taking on the See York Run York event on 26th Feb. 26.2 being unofficially known as Marathon Day (think about it if you're not sure why!) and a good excuse to hold a marathon around the streets of York. It also coincided with the 70th birthday of local running legend Paul Adams so another excuse to celebrate with a run.
60 of us started with Simon finishing the marathon in 4:56:44 and Jo completing 18 miles in 3:27:55. The course was redesigned at the last minute due to flooding along the river and runners had the option of completing a half marathon, 18 miles, 23 miles or marathon.
Back to Benidorm on Sat night. Thanks to Melissa for the photo with Si finishing the half in a very swift 1:28:23 and 86th place out of 1590 finishers. Good work Si.
Back in damp old Blighty we had one parkrun on in York with 5 laps of the cycle track at Heslington facing the regulars. Elsewhere Simon was over in Cheshire taking on the Chester Ultra, a 44 mile affair around the county. Mud, mud glorious mud was the theme of the day and it took it's toll on the ability to run. Checkpoint 4 arrived at 30 miles and I was done. Handed my tracker in and sat down for my first DNF. One benefit of DNFing in the middle of a forest is that there's no one there to drive you back to the finish. As I got colder and colder I resorted to the only thing I know to keep me warm and started running again and happily got through the last 14-15 miles to finish in 11 ish hours. The photo below gives a sense of the glorious mud, Dee you would have loved it. Oh and I bumped into some strange bloke from York Acorn.
Roundhay parkrun
Jim Carter 20.35
Dom Carter 22.23
Andy Heather 22.34
Temple Newsam parkrun
Mark Dodsworth 22.40
Heslington parkrun
Paul Hatfield 20.52
Lucy Turner 31.17
Sam Lynn 41.24
Dalby Forest parkrun
Jonathan Richardson 52.21
Newborough Forest parkrun
Helena Senior 43.19
Castle Howard parkrun
Ben Briffaud 20.49
Karen Travis 32.44
Sandhurst Memorial parkrun
Andrew Halcro-Johnston 24.52
That's it for this week folks. The river looks like it's receding again revealing some of our regular running tracks. Coach will be thinking of the lighter nights and a return to our urban track. Hope to see lots of you on Weds, 6.30pm at the Minster Inn.