Allendale 2011

Saturday morning saw me standing in glorious sunshine in Allendale Square, Northumberland ready to start my 4th Allendale Challenge with a collection of about a hundred runners.

The ‘Allendale Challenge’ is a 40km run over the North Peninnes, covering conditions from stunning hill climbs to  some of the finest peat bogs in England.

As we left Allendale town and followed the raod up toward the chimney, I was still in site of the lead runners, not a position i’m normally in, especially having ran over 30 miles already this week.

As we got up onto the open moor the field started to spread out and following the descent to Nine Bank and the long climb back up to Hard Rigg I found myself pretty much running on my own, only occasionally catching or being caught by one of the other runners.

By Black Hill and going up onto Kilhope Law we’d caught the main body of walkers that had started 2 hours before us. At ths point we were picking our way through the labyrinth of peat bogs, a tricky task no matter how light footed a runner you may think you are. Even seasoned runners like the runner from Durham fell runners i’d been following for a mile or so, managed to sink up to his waist in one bogs, luckily I was on hand to give him a hand getting out.

Once out of the peat bogs, the track got a bit better underfoot as it headed down towards Spartylea, I still half expected to be over taken by big group of runners that I knew were still somewhere behind me.

Then we turned uphill once again on to  ’The Drag’ the last long climb of the day, I could see a couple of runners up ahead, and I slowly began to close the gap between us.

By the time we reached the top of the last climb, i knew we only had 20 minutes or so to go, and I could see i was in for a great time if i just kept going. At this point the guy from DFR that i’d helped out of the bog was hot on my heals and we kept pushing each other right up to the finish line, running over the line together in 4 hours at 37 minutes,coming in in 18th place of 79 finishers, 45 minutes faster than my previous pb.