Llangollen Fell Race

Surprisingly I haven’t had a sleep yet. 

Sitting down in the sports hall of Dinas Bran school, nursing a flapjack and a cup of tea, I could happily have curled up on the hard bench for a quick twenty winks and then some. But now, after my chocolate milk and a bit of lunch, having been driven home by Alex, I’m feeling a shade more awake. 

Alex. Let me tell you about Alex. She’s a young, energetic woman who has found her joy in the off-road running world. She loves the fells so much that she does about five or six reccies before the big races, supposedly to get more familiar with the route, but I know it’s to just get out in those hills. So perhaps she wasn’t the best person to listen to when we were talking about this race.

‘Oh, you’ll be fine, Rita,’ she said.
‘It’s mainly trail, Rita,’ she said.

Alex was doing the longer seventeen-mile race that started half an hour before my suggested ten-mile one and was offering to pick me up from home and drop me back off. It sounded like a fun Sunday morning, so I signed up in early March and then spent the time in between wondering what the hell I had let myself in for. I have only ever done five-mile races in the hills before, and the last one of those was over a year ago. Yes, I can run over ten miles. On the road. On the relatively flat road.

Coming into the sports hall this morning, we saw quite a few of our club members in amongst the scores of runners, swapping road shoes for fell and arranging their running vests. There was one water station available to the longer route runners for them to fill up their camelbaks or water bottles. This was no road race that lets you slurp from some single-use plastic every three miles and fling it away for someone else to clean. Fell runners carry their own food and drinks, alongside a few obligatory items that could make the difference if something drastic happens.

Kate showed me a sleeping bag that packed down into her fist. I didn’t need one of those luckily, but I did have a waterproof jacket and trousers that would not have folded down into the Hulk’s fist. I did manage to stuff them into my vest backpack.

I’d found out a couple of days before that the route had been changed, so that the seventeen miles was now eighteen and a half, and likewise my ten had had another mile and a half cunningly slipped on. I tried, very hard not to think about it, which was a good thing because extra mileage was not the only difference.

The weather as we drove into Llangollen was a mixed bag of sunshine and light rain. Rainbows were painted onto the sky and Will put a positive spin on it by saying that we were driving into that blue bit over there. As I snapped pics of the club’s long-course runners there was blue in the sky, along with alabaster, cement and graphite degrees of grey (thank you paint shop for those names). 

Those clouds came and went on my race too. Having calmed down enough to get jogging along the school field, I realised I was in familiar territory when there was just one person behind me at the gate at the end. Then we turned right up the road – ‘up’ being the operative word – and then there was no-one behind me. Eventually we got onto path, but ‘up’ we continued to go. Surprisingly, I was never quite alone, with a few stragglers always in sight. 

I was in it now, and so there was no space to fret anymore, just a long time to trudge before the paths flattened enough for a jog. As we climbed out of the town the views opened up, and despite my inability to breathe very well, I felt the privilege of being out there.

The rains came and went, sometimes bordering on icy, but the sun also showed up, forcing me to shed a layer for a period. I was pleased that I only got to know the name of the back sweeper in the second half the race. Before that I traded places sometimes with a young woman called Emma, (who also worked with Will coincidentally) and a sixty-eight-year-old called Charles who looked like he walked the whole thing, extremely fast, and could wipe the floor with me on the up hills. 

It was during one of those overtakes that John made himself known as the ten-mile (11.5 really) back marker. By this time I’d been passed by a few of the seventeen (18.5) milers and we were heading back for home. He told me Charles had been a very strong runner in his time, and that this was his local turf. Which made me feel a mite better that he’d pushed on ahead of me again.

I was pleased to make John’s acquaintance when I did, because it wasn’t long before one of the ‘route changes’ reared its ugly head. The gully. I feel it should be all upper-case, and bold and italicised, and, even then, the name doesn’t do the path justice. It was one of those parts where my feet were constantly at an acute angle with my shins and my calves were screaming to be released from the pull. And then there was the false summit, where I got to where the top had been just a few moments ago only to realise that I was barely halfway up. John kindly kept talking to me and doing his best to distract me from the ordeal and somehow, I got to the real top. 

The downhill would have been gorgeous if my legs hadn’t been so wobbly but I did, generally, keep a gentle bounce on all the way down to road. To the second of the ‘route changes’.

Apparently in previous years the Castell Dinas Brân had been bypassed, but this time, on a zig zaggy path that was equally steep to the gully albeit shorter, we trudged our way up to and through the ruins of the mediaeval fortress. 

I like me a ruin on a normal day but I barely gave a glance to the anoraked hikers who were having their sandwiches in a ditch by the stone works to get out of the wind, as I realised that this was absolutely definitely the last hill and that I was nearly home. At this point, Emma, who had evidently been relaxing, after the top of the gully with John, scampered down the hill past me and I, on legs that were almost the consistency of blancmange, started up a slow jog again and eventually found myself at the gazebo on the school field.

As races go, that was seriously tough. Was it worth the free buff, cup of tea and flapjack? For me, now that I managed to complete it, I felt a great sense of achievement, so yes, it was. It was a well-marked course with friendly encouraging marshals and a top back marker. The fatigue was real, as was the extra (compared to previous years) 1000ft of extra climbing, so the weariness in my body felt like a badge of honour. Yes, I was pretty much last as someone always has to be, but I had put the work in in terms of building up my distance running at least, although I definitely could have done more hill work. As Alex said to me, 

‘If you want to get better at fell running, you need to do more fell running.’

Will I? Errm…