Today me and Hester headed over to the North York Moors for my first fast and furious (rather than long and ploddy) fell race of the year,
the Pinchinthorpe Plod. The
Esk Valley Fell Club organise a winter series of races over there (and a summer one too) with all of the races being given brilliantly natty names - the Pinchinthorpe Plod, the Blakey Blitz, the Eskdale Eureka, the Commondale Clart etc etc. You get the picture.
All of the races are superb with a great bunch of runners, mostly from the north east (lots of geordie spoken, 'wai ai mon'), and are especially beginner friendly as they don't go stupidly high and tend to stick to relatively civilised terrain with lots of beautifully wooded hills and heathery moor tops. That said the races can be stupendously muddy in the North York Moors, although conversely today the ground was as dry as a bone.
I can sometimes do quite well in these races, relatively speaking, but mostly I try and beat the women racers as the best men tend to leave me for dust (in my defence I'm no spring chicken). For much of today's race I was in 'first woman' position but, with a mile to go, I was over taken by two ladies goddamit and, despite my valiant efforts to reel them in, I had to settle for third woman. That said the first lady only beat me by 13 seconds and third woman's not to be sniffed at (I think I came 23rd overall with a time of
48:50 minutes). Hester ran a blinder of a race and came in as fourth woman proper.
Results
Another beautiful warm day and the scenery was a bit of a contrast to yesterday:
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| A lovely climb through the woods |
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| There're getting further away.... |
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| Roseberry Topping ahoy! |
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| I think the chimney smoke is coming from Middlesbrough, thankfully obscured by the beautiful countryside |
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| Me (light blue top) hard on the heels of the 1st and 2nd place ladies |
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| Hester speeding home soon after |
excellent report Sir!
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