I know one of the young lads who trains with Andrew Douglas.... in conversation i asked him if he (not Douglas) was any good... "i'm ok" was the reply...
pb on 5km of something like 14:25
I know one of the young lads who trains with Andrew Douglas.... in conversation i asked him if he (not Douglas) was any good... "i'm ok" was the reply...
pb on 5km of something like 14:25
Much relieved that current issue is much slimmer making reading easier. Glue binding does not lay flat like good old staples. Really enjoyed the piece on the junior Scottish islands peaks race. Took me back to 1992-95 when I did 4 on the trot as the adult shepherd runner. Glad to see the unique flavour is unchanged!
Only had a flick through so far, too many pictures of Matthew Elkington for my liking
Glad Breezy likes the Manx article as it's one I sub-edited down from an initial very long submission, without (I think/hope!) losing the story and point. Reading the story of the first race made me wish I was there!
...and to go with the flow: take the plastic wrap and put it with your bread bags and other magazine wraps etc. for recycling with plastic bags at your local store. More fruit/veg packaging is becoming recyclable in this way so better in this respect and in terms of preservation.
Nic Barber. Downhill Dandy
But wouldn't it be better to use one of the plastic alternatives, Reduce, Re-use, Recycle?
Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run
50th anniversary issue just arrived....looks Brill. Looking forwards to settling down with a nice mug of cocoa to lubricate a trip down memory lane. Any mag that's got Harry Walker on the cover is gonna be great!
And Harry's grandson inside! What an issue. Hats off to all.
Neil Shuttleworth's reference to AAA entry forms brought back a memory. He refers to them in connection with the Carnethy Hill Race, so in fact it must have been a SAAA entry form that was required.
My first two fell races were Carnethy in 1977 and 1978, with entries dealt with by our club secretary (it was the only fell/hill race we went to as a club); but then, wanting to do more of the sport, I decided to enter the Ben Lomond Race as an individual. The one truly terrifying moment of that, my first Category A race, was when I saw the entry form: a standard SAAA entry form, an A4 sheet full of requests for all sorts of information and declarations, much of which I didn't understand and seemed totally irrelevant to the hill race that I wanted to enter.
In his lifetime he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen.
Jorge Luis Borges
That the 127th and 50th Anniversary Fellrunner is the best edition there has ever been, and probably ever likely to be, is presumably beyond question, produced by an excellent team inspired by Chairman Charmian. If I was forced to name a favourite article it would be Neil Talbott's profile of Martin Stone which lightly displays the diligent research that takes time and effort within a captivating writing style.
But I like a good list and so, on a more prosaic level, the feature I have returned to most often is the listing of English and British Champions presented in a more accessible form than on the FRA website.
Thirty years ago Neil Shuttleworth produced a booklet The Best Of British - A Review of Fell Running Champions including brief comments from the Champions between 1972 and 1989. Maybe one day a long form book will appear - Fell Running Champions? Perhaps on the lines of the excellent The Yellow Jersey Club - Inside the Minds of the Tour de France Winners by Edward Pickering?
One of the uses of the Fellrunner listings is that one can compare side by side the winners of the English and British Championships and see how dominated by English runners the British Championship actually is. When I was writing Profiles I would ask my subjects why they would favour one over the other. Sometimes the answer might be that to win the British showed you were "the best" and other answers included "leaving something for the other guy" - but all conscientiously recorded by this dutiful amanuensis without challenge!
Including the pithy comment from Dave Spedding, who won multiple Gold Medals as a V40, V50, V55, V60 and lived and worked in Keswick, that if you wanted longevity as a fell runner you should "treat the Bob Graham as a major health risk".
Last edited by Graham Breeze; 30-08-2020 at 10:46 AM.
"...as dry as the Atacama desert".
To my untrained eyes (and i speak purely as an outsider... whilst i have ran in both British and English champs races, i've never concentrated on them, and then i'd be extremely fortunate to get near the top 100....)
In these modern times i've always looked at the English Champs being slightly the stronger of the two... only really because of the above-mentioned domination of English runners, and appears to me to generally be higher numbers competing... the locations tend to lend themselves towards the largest concentration of top runners.
However in the last year or two i've perceived a slight shift back towards the British Champs... perhaps because of the emergence of very strong runners from the other nations... weren't the top 3 at Ras Yr Aran in March all Scottish?
I may be completely wrong on this... would be really interesting to hear the opinions of those right at the sharp end.