Moel y Ci bites me again!

What is it with this innocuous looking Fell Race, yet again it gave me a good kicking, to make things worse my quads are still angry with me for paying the very reasonable £4 entry fee when I could have been seeking a bar to watch some Rugby. In truth I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else on such a gorgeous day despite walking away with a heavy heart.

I could make excuses for being 30 seconds slower than last year when I was aiming to be 2 minutes faster (these may seem small margins, but they hurt!) but in truth I simply got the build up wrong & chose the wrong shoes to compound things.

The race was very well attended with 160 in a strong field, starting near the front I was soon being regularly overtaken, no shame in that normally but I knew something wasn’t right & slowly switched to don’t overdo it mode, remember 3 years ago! It was not really a surprise when shortly after passing the summit Kean (aka The Fading Legend, to me at least) came past me & fairly rapidly moved out of sight on the descent. What a descent it is, here my shoe choice really caught me out (I’d worn an old Salomon S Lab pair not wanting to hammer my new ones on the tarmac sections) as I slipped & slided my way to the bottom whilst being passed by all & sundry.

During the long run in things only got marginally better but at least I reached the line still running straight unlike the debacle of 2012. In the end Kean was over two & a half minutes ahead of me, Sandra had also struggled on the descent (her foot injury gave her a far better excuse than me) but as I said the main thing was that we had all done it & got back safely. For me it was a reality check after two good races in January, more mountains in training seem called for prior to taking on the enormous field in the Moelwyn’s in April.

Thanks to Gary PJ for taking over from Jeremy as race organiser, as you said Gary it is indeed a stressful responsibility to undertake but you & your team did a great job & I hope you feel great satisfaction that it went so well.

I am off out now to loosen those quads & to hopefully put my own disappointment behind me.

Finally, good luck with the Op. next week Sandra.