Quote Originally Posted by Witton Park View Post
I've just got a few observations here and I wondered what others thought. Please bear in mind this is based on my limited 5 or 6 years of these relays so I stand to be corrected.

1. This year the stats look quite challenging. Of course when the venue is Llanberis that is likely to mean a bit more ascent than the other recent venues, but the legs are also a little longer. So we have approx 20% more climb and 10% more distance than recent years.
Time spreads
Church Stretton 2012 were 3:16 - 6:56
Kettlewell 2011 were 3:23 - 7:00
Lomonds of Fife were 3:50 - 7:54
Ennerdale were 3:29 - 7:03

There's no predicted leg times that I can see on the event website, but looking at the stats I'd have thought any team getting in under 4 hours won't be far off winning.
I'd go as far as to say I think the winning time may be outside of the 4 hour barrier.

2. If I'm close on point 1, then that means that we will have a spread up to 8 hours this year as the slowest teams are usually twice the time of the winning team.
However we have the 3 HOUR Cut off at the end of Leg 2.
I can see this catching a lot, possibly 25% of the teams that are involved.
If you consider that last year around 10% of the leg 1 runners were outside 1 hour and 15% of Leg 2 runners outside of 2 hours and around 10% of the teams involved finished leg 2 outside of 3 hours.

This is definitely a more challenging route.

So should there be a cut-off at 3 hours? Surely it would be better to have a leg 3 mass start at 3 hours and perhaps a leg 4 mass start at 4:30?
That's got to be preferable to having up to 150 runners unable to have their run.

As I say above, I might be missing something as I'm just looking at the stats for the legs and I've never raced in the area, just watched a few races.
For information WP.

As one of the course designers (bar navigation leg) I'm estimating winning leg times as:

Leg 1: 30mins
Leg 2: 1.15mins
Leg 3: 1-1.15 (this is what I've been told)
Leg 4: 40mins

Therefore I wouldn't worry about the winners struggling to get home in over 4 hours, by my estimates they'll be way under 4 hours.

Regards these being more challenging routes, again having ran the last 6 relays I'd have to disagree with you. Leg 1 is certainly one of the shortest and easiest for a few years. Leg 2 I'd agree is one of the toughest of last few years, the stiff climb up Moel Cynghorion being the killer. Having said that, the long leg up in the Lomonds a few years back had a winning time of over 1hr 10mins, there was also one stiff climb on the long leg at Bingley two years ago. Leg 3 I've no idea but I'd guess similar to previous relays. Leg 4 is some 5 minutes longer than last years 1st and 4th legs - basically one big climb / descent.