In Lytham St Annes Road Runners’ Club there are one or two people for whom normal race distances just aren’t enough. These are members who like to take part in ultra-distance races, that is any race that is over a full marathon in length. Debbie Cooper is one of these, and proved it by running the South Wales 50 at the weekend. Fifty miles that is.
Due to a navigation error, her group actually ran an incredible 54.69 miles in approximately 13 hours 43 minutes. The total ascent was 10,997 feet, sometimes in damp and misty conditions, and sometimes on paths overgrown with scratching brambles.
Debbie knows she finished as the third lady, and, alongside partner Daryl, eighth overall. And all this was just a warm-up for the big event at the end of July, the Lakeland 100. Yes, that is 100 miles.
Lytham runners Chris McCarthy, Julia Rolfe and Greg Oulton ran Aggie’s Staircase fell race on Thursday. At 4.1 miles with and just under 1000 feet of ascent, the race starts with a sprint across a field to a narrow path which climbs steeply for a mile to Darwen Tower (officially known as Jubilee Tower), with a slight dip at the half mile point. From the tower it drops for half a mile before rising again via a rough trail through the heather and bracken, before dropping back to the start.
Aggie’s Staircase itself is actually the name of one of the three climbs, the steepest and, fortunately, also the shortest. Run in glorious weather the only thing missing was the mud, which is the norm for a fell race. Despite a fall, Chris finished twelfth in 32:28. Julia came second in her F50 category in 47:30 while Greg was 136th from the 153 finishers in 50:49.
Constantly improving Felicity Wolohan achieved yet another pb on Sunday. A week after her superb performance at Freckleton, this time she was in action in the Penny Lane 10K in Liverpool. Hosted by the Penny Lane Striders club, the course of the race has been improved in recent years to make it faster and flatter. Felicity took full advantage to break her pb by 45 seconds with a time of 40:18, and to finish as the fourth woman. And this was the day after running the 5k Long Eaton Parkrun, in which she was the first woman and 16th overall from 386 competitors.
No comments:
Post a Comment