Quote Originally Posted by Rudolph Hooker View Post
The one part of this event which really detracts from the overall sense of wild and bleak moors is, of course, the run down the Snake Road from Upper North Grain to the checkpoint at the Snake Inn.

Last year the traffic seemed worse than ever, with one or two foolish drivers seeing how close they could get to the runners. It's only a matter of time and the law of averages before our luck here runs out.

I would have thought that there might be a way of forcing the runners to take an off-road route here by relocating the checkpoint from the Snake Inn to somewhere near the confluence of the Ashop and Lady Clough (or maybe a little further north where you might get vehicular access) so that runners could take the opportunity to get onto the path down the East side of the Ashop and cut almost all of the dangerous road running out.

Just a thought.
Whilst recce'ing the second half of the route only last week, I was nearly taken out by a motorbike playing chicken with me on the A57. There's a whole network of paths down in the Lady Clough woods and the "blue" path (there's a few coloured routes down there) would be the ideal one to follow from the Nether North Grain lay-by. That means that runners are on the road for only a few hundred metres and can then disappear off into the woods. The path is good and runnable and follows the river all the way down to the little footbridge that you cross to start up Kinder. It wouldn't detract from any of the major strategic choices which generate much of the pub talk about this race and making the section of road O.O.B. wouldn't detract too much as it's only a few mins faster anyway.

As has been said, supporters could quite easily park up at the much larger Birchen Clough car park (the one with the butty van) and walk the 100 yds down to the footpath.

And running flat-out in studs down the tarmac really really really hurts!