DPFR2010
Choosing my first race with the dark peak. Hardly wise to choose the club championships but hey, might as well show enthusiasm and willing. Besides, work location has meant the weekly warts runs have not been a goer for me.
The handicapped state of the race meant that I was one of the very early starters at 10:02 am with most of the field behind me including Lynn at 1010. I have to admit that I probably looked like a bit of a divvy at the startline with a rucsac on as everyone else was in the sunshine in minimal clothing and carrying a tiny bumbag. I was however aware of 2 things – I was going to be out longer than everyone else (potentially a lot longer if I hurt myself) and I was going to be running the Lake District Triathlons with all this kit so I might as well take it with me.
By the time the heather and bracken of the first slopes opened up ahead of me, the thretening fog that we’d driven through on the way to Glossop peeled back and I simply followed the lines of runners ahead of me at one minute intervals, relieved I could see that far.
Up on the moorland it felt a little uncomfortable following other people but the compass bearing felt about right. Someone was heading out to my right which did, in fact, look like a better route to the somewhat craggy one I had chosen. We walked / ran together for a bit then broke away from the path and the bog- hopping began. Usually when I am walking I hate bog hopping. Making my way around tussocky lumps of peaty mess. Puddles of mud that can suck in a person up to his waist and eat shoes whole or ruin a walking day by filling the boots with icy cold mud. Away from the bogs is tussocky heather which can twist an ankle or knee and somethimes the heather has more bog hiding under it.
I loved bog hopping in a fell race. Gauging depth of bog or the preference of bog over tussock became a game. Every so often I elevated myself out of a bog onto tussock to see where I was and finally the Wainstones of Bleaklow came into view. Everyone around me accellerated a little as the cloud cleared from around them.
Slightly worried about the people who’d lost their dog but seemed to know one of my team mates anyway, I started a descent to Wildboar Clough, Glossopside. The bog-hopping was really fun here as I used the slopes of the bog on my descent to turn and control my speed as if I were on skis. Finally the bog got me and stole my left shoe. Soon after I retied my laces, Lynn ran past – as did Kev and Tom apparently.
The runner I was with commented that others were now starting to pass us thick and fast. It was clear that despite starting 34 minutes behind me, most of the fast runenrs were going to catch me up.
Having descended as low as we could down Wildboar Clough, faced with nothing more than a fence and a steep drop-off / waterfall we climbed the fence only to find the marshall struggling to tie the lost dog to the fence. We informed him of the whereabouts of its owner and my temporary running partner stopped for a chat. I left the dog chewing through the marshall’s camera strap, its new temporary leash and struck out on my next compass bearing.
I found it astonishing that, given the group 100m to my right and the two runners 100m to my left, and the 10 acres of open moorland before me that one runners’ footprint in the bog fell in the line of my footfall on my bearing. I felt crowded yet strangely comforted.
We spilled over a styal and down to a fence. The only time I didn’t feel foolish for carrying a whole laminated map of the dark peak as I perched the front cover on the barbed wire and used the nap as a crotch-protector to scale something a little taller than my legs are long. Down a steep-sided corrie with runners tumbling by me.
With a bike race on Sunday, I took it easy. Next, striking out across the bog which oozed from the watery base of the corrie, a stream of runners led me out to the end of Long Gutter Edge, checkpoint 2 and the beginning of the most gruelling part of the day – a 200m scrabble down a steep, rocky heathery gully and 150m up the other near-vertical side. As my heart pounded in my mouth and my calf muscles screamed for mercy it occurred to me I’d been on less steep slopes in a harness and ropes before and it didn’t help that a rugby-ball sized rock, dislodged by one of the other runners, went skimming across the top of the heather beside me. I stood on a 4 ft tall boulder somewhere in the middle of the heather and watched the fast men go by – their wrists bleeding as they grabbed clumps of the spiny moorland undergrowth. I realised what the girls had been talking about when I over-heard, “You think you’ve cracked it and then it just goes up again”.
The terrain eased to one I could scramble across then it headed up vertically again and I regularly found myself taking 4ft high steops up to get out of a muddy pit or over a boulder.
Finally it was over and one last bit of heathery moorland led me across to checkpoint 4. Sadly this was the hardest bit of heathery moorland I had seen – partly, no mostly, down to my recent efforts on the 60 degree slope and partly due to it being on the later part of the race.
Although the outward appearance was more or less smooth, neatly sheared, common height of heathery blanket, beneath lay rocks, boulders, burms, boulders and bogs. Ankles were not safe and in my tired state I appeared to be drunk compared to everyone else with my arms flailing like windmill sails and my knees bolting left and right like masts of moored boats on a breezy day.
At the ruin I met my new club’s chairman who had re-injured his ankle and was up for limping home. My calfs were starting to cramp so I gave him some of my energy drink while I munched on an energy gel.
He was happy left to his own devices so I ran along watching most of the fast runners pass by. This became my demise when, approaching civilisation, I neglected to turn off a defined track between two wall down a hillside and over-shot the finish by about ¼ of a mile. Retracing my route was impractical so I looped around the roads near the finish and sneaked up on the timekeepers including TSK, asking, “Who ya waitin’ for?”
Lessons learned:
- print off a section of the map rather than carrying the whole thing with me.
- Buy a laminator
- Do lots of research – write the compass bearings on the map and check google satellite for features
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