SportsShoes Blog

It’s been a fairly steady week this week - bike to work Monday, Tuesday and Friday - speed session on Tuesday night (3 x 6 minute efforts) - 5 miles on the road on Wednesday night (few hills and the last half mile at pace) - rest Thursday.

I’ll be resting up tomorrow as well as Sunday morning I’m running for Bingley in the Calderdale Way (CW) relay. The CW is a 50 odd mile circular tour of the Calder valley. For the race, the route is split into 5 legs of varying distance and climb and each leg is covered by teams of two runners.

Relays are always hard work for one member of the team as no two people run at exactly the same pace. This weekend it’s going to be my turn to suffer as I’m running with my pal Martin who is much faster than I am. His job will be to open gates and hurl encouragement (read abuse) at me and my job will be to keep my head down and pull my tripe out!!!

The only upside to this wet, muddy and painful event is that we all get together on Sunday evening for a debrief (well a booze up actually) where we can talk about how well we should have run and make endless excuses for our feeble efforts.

Once the CWs out the way it’s just a week to the Santa Cycle - can’t wait….

What a weekend…..for the Bingley Harriers at the Ben Nevis Fell race.

Rob Jebb was 2nd overall missing out on top spot by just 13 seconds to the world number one sky runner Augusti Roc of Spain.

Bingley picked up 1st mens team award with Rob Jebb, Robin Lawrence and Paul Mitchell as counters

Ali Raw won the ladies (just) over 40 title.

My ‘old’ pals Ian Goodyear and Mick Ford both completed their 20th Ben races - just one more for each of them before they are awarded their 21 race trophies.

Added to that, I had a great run finishing in 43rd place (out of 442) in a personal best time of 1hr 52 mins. I turned at the top in 1hr 16 mins which is not my fastest ascent but had a storming return making the 4.5 miles and 4000 ft of descent back to the finish field in just 36 mins. I feel that if I could work on my climbing I may still have a very good Ben time in me.

I pipped my training partner Jamie Robinson by a minute or so which I was pleased about as he’s running strong at the minute and I thought he’d have got the better of me on this one. It was a great run for Jamie though and he too beat his Ben PB by some margin.

In all we had around 20 harriers in the field making for a great race and an even better night out.

Quite unbelievably, whilst most of England was swimming, the weather for the whole weekend was fantastic although the strong winds at the summit made the 7 degree temperature feel a lot colder. (It always amuses me to see runners in shorts and vests passing walkers in base layers, mid layers and triple layer gore-tex jackets).

This year the Ben race was a round of the World Sky-running championship and as such attracted around 20 runners from Spain, Italy, Andora and France. As Rob Jebb said in his ‘few words’ at the award ceremony, our ‘European’ friends really proved to us that they can run up and down one of the knarliest and toughest of Britain’s hills and not just on nice smooth alpine tracks.

As predicted, my legs feel a little on the heavy side today. I’m hoping they might have softened a little by tomorrow and if they have I’ll probably try a little spin out in the evening.

I need to concentrate as much as possible on the bike now for the next couple of weeks as my next event is the 3 Peaks Cyclo Cross at the end of September.

Saturday - decided to race tomorrow at Oldfield. This is a nice little local fell race - just 5.5miles and 550ft of climb. Oldfield’s just about 8 miles from home so I’m going to cycle over to the race, run it, then cycle back - should be a decent training session.

As I’m racing tomorrow I just did a steady 40 mins this morning - similar route to yesterday but in reverse.

I’d left my trainers out all night so they were nice and squishy when I put them on this morning - didn’t notice after first field crossing!!