30/12/2009 by Lou.
New Years Eve
The last Club Champs race is Thursday night – Nos Galan at Mountain Ash.Meet at Leisure Centre 5pm to share lifts – please check the CH News Blog tomorrow afternoon as we may bring the time forward if the weather makes driving times likely to be longer.
After the race everyone is invited to a curry night – Lou’s Year Eve. See Bulletin Board for details. Please bring a curry- accompaniments and drinks will be provided.Party starts at 10pm. See you there.
Lou
The Last Week Ahead (of 2009)
28/12/2009 by Dick.
The final week of the year and the final Club Championship race - make it a good one.
Some people have asked for a speed session alternative to Tuesday’s advertised Tour Of The Town, as preparation for Thursday night’s fast Nos Galan 5k. So you can opt for 3 or 4 sets of the 800/400/400 Link Road session we did four weeks ago, or join in the up and down of Chepstow’s urban circuit. Why not push hard on the hills of the Tour and get the benefits of a hill session?!
But remember that the Leisure Ctre will be closed later so no chance of changing and showering there.
Either way you should make every effort to attend Saturday’s training talk and session that we emailed to all members a few weeks ago:
“All members are invited to a special training session at 9.30 am Saturday 2 January 2010 that will be led by Viv Matthews a very experienced Level 4 Endurance (Long Distance) Coach and a UKA Regional Trainer (Coach Education & Development). He also happens to be Rich Matthews’ dad, but please don’t hold that against him.
It will consist of a 45 minute talk in the Leisure Ctre on endurance training, followed by an hour or so of training in Piercefield Park and a Q&A/debrief/chat over a drink back in the warm.”
Caldicot Boxing Day Race 2009
26/12/2009 by Ivan.
The 27th., ever-popular, free-entry, 2.8 mile Caldicot Boxing Day Run, once again attracted 45 runners, the majority coming from Chepstow Harriers and friends. Despite some post Christmas Day lethargy from some folk !, British and Welsh international Steve Davies had a comfortable win in 13mins. 29 secs. at the sharp end. First lady Lou Summers had a good run in 18mins. 23 secs. Ye Olde Tippling Philosopher did us proud once again with free mince pies after the event. Thanks again to them for pre and post facilities !
Caldicot Boxing Day Run 2009 Results
Gareth Jones.
Race Director of Caldicot Boxing Day Race ( Free to all)
Tues 22 Dec - Training Cancelled
22/12/2009 by Dick.
I’ve agreed with tonight’s Coach, Andy Meek-Welsh, that with the temperature rapidly dropping, and the Link Road not cleared of snow, speed work would be too hazardous. Sorry to spoil people’s fun.
I hear that some members will be heading for the Coach & Horses at 8.30 for a pre-Christmas drink.
The Part Week Ahead
22/12/2009 by Dick.
I’ve left posting this week’s training as late as poss to see whether the weather will allow us to do tonight’s (Tuesday’s) planned session of 2 mins fast/1 min slower on the Link Road and Severn Bridge. It’s thawing at the timeof writing (3.30) but with a clear sky could freeze again at nightfall. We’ll do another post later if it looks too tricky for running.
No training planned for Thursday and Saturday is the Caldicot Boxing Day Run.
Post-run Treatment
18/12/2009 by Dick.
Our own Jo Pollard is an HPC and CSP registered Physiotherapist and Sports Massage Therapist (level 4 registered), and can be booked for treatment in the Leisure Ctre after training, or at home.
You can catch Jo most Club nights or on her mobile - 07734 200880 .
Inter Regional XC Successes
17/12/2009 by Dick.
A goodly number of Chepstow runners ran for East Wales in the National Inter Regionals Cross-Country at Builth Wells last Sunday.
The Senior Men’s team with Rich Matthews and Mark Harvey were most successful, in first place. The Women’s 35 Team with Vanessa Lawson were 2nd as were the Men’s 35 & 40 Teams with Stuart Penny well up the field. Kath Matthews (6th) and Marianne Gittoes (8th) had good placings in the Snr Women’s race but were part of a team of only three.
Also representing the region were junior Will Leney, Sue Ashton, Brenda Avery, Laurie Carter, Kevin McEntee, Syd Wheeler and Dick Finch. And thanks to Eric Bailey, selector and Team Manager.
Tintern Hash Run 10.30 Sunday 20th Dec
16/12/2009 by Lou.
As promised - the Hash will start from the car park 200m past the Royal George - from Chepstow into Tintern - turn left at the Royal George. As Dick has said:
And finally, one of the year’s highlights on Sunday - our Christmas Hash put on by the Tintern mafia: Dave Andrews, Paul Christie and Rob Barker! Starts at 10.30am and features the numerous paths criss-crossing the Tintern woods (here’s your chance to see them in daylight!).
Seasonal prizes for winners, a special prize for the best Christmas fancy dress, and free food and drink to every runner who gets to the finish wearing at least one Christmas tree decoration. Bring all your family - secret short cuts will be revealed to under 11s and over 14-stoners! - but even to do half the route they must be capable of covering at least 3.5 hilly, muddy miles in about 1.5 hours. Not suitable for buggys I’m afraid.
Starts at the car park we use for Offa’s Orror overflow, 200 metres along the road to Trelleck from the Royal George hotel in Tintern. Ready to run 10.30.
The Week Coming Up
14/12/2009 by Dick.
It’s our monthly visit to the Severn Bridge on Tuesday. Can you beat your best time as a Christmas bonus?
On Thursday your choice is 6, 7 or 8 miles on the Boughspring run. Whichever you do you need to be back in time to shower and change and get down to the Mughal Spice at 8.45 for our Christmas eat-all-you-can-for-£15 curry bash. You should have told Niki you’re coming via her home email address on the Bulletin Board under Social Whirlwind /Mughal Spice. Forgotten? Get on to it now!
You may also have picked up on the Bulletin Board the Forest of Dean Half recce that Berta has arranged on Saturday morning. The course has changed this year, so if you’d like a fairly easy run round to give you that advance knowledge, then some of us are leaving the Leis Ctre at 10, and some are going straight to the Speech House car park for the 10.30 start.
We’ve also been asked to mention a 5k charity run in Tredegar Park, also on Saturday at 10.30. In aid of St David’s Foundation you can enjoy a disco, hot drinks and cheerleaders on this festive run/jog/aerobathon (you’ll have to go to find out!).
And finally, one of the year’s highlights on Sunday - our Christmas Hash put on by the Tintern mafia: Dave Andrews, Paul Christie and Rob Barker! Starts at 10.30am and features the numerous paths criss-crossing the Tintern woods (here’s your chance to see them in daylight!).
Seasonal prizes for winners, a special prize for the best Christmas fancy dress, and free food and drink to every runner who gets to the finish wearing at least one Christmas tree decoration. Bring all your family - secret short cuts will be revealed to under 11s and over 14-stoners! - but even to do half the route they must be capable of covering at least 3.5 hilly, muddy miles in about 1.5 hours. Not suitable for buggys I’m afraid.
Starts at the car park we use for Offa’s Orror overflow, 200 metres along the road to Trelleck from the Royal George hotel in Tintern. Ready to run 10.30.
Adventure Racing World Championships 2009
11/12/2009 by Ivan.
Adventure Racing World Championships 2009
By Tom Gibbs, Team Helly Hansen - Prunesco
The World Champs had become my bogey race. In my previous 3 attempts I’d never finished, a sore point in more ways than one. Firstly in Switzerland in 2001, teammate Ski Sharp retired after 1 day with a serious injury. In 2006, whilst on for a top 5 finish in Sweden, I dislodged a large boulder which crushed my right foot. Scotland in 2007 was to be our year for a top notch result, put the bad luck behind us, but this was ruined by a hidden Rockledge which teammate Helen Jackson landed on whilst canyoning, she was lucky to come away with only severe bruising.
So I approached Portugal in 2009 feeling like my chance of a good result was probably past and just hoping for once to finish the World Champs. Little did I realise what was going to happen…
Preparations didn’t go well, Nicola Macleod coming onboard only a month beforehand to join myself Warren Bates and Nick Gracie. We also sorted out a (top notch) support crew with only 2 weeks to go, the excellent Nicola Wiseman and Open Adventure impresario James Thurlow. The Nicola’s then volunteered to drive to Portugal to get a load of our kit there, and an epic journey via a 36-hour ferry journey.
Expectations weren’t high, so we all seemed pretty chilled before the race, certainly Warren and myself seemed pretty philosophical about this event, sharing so much disappointment in previous races. This seemed to help take any pressure off and soon we were lining up on Sunday morning for Stage 1 – a pseudo prologue around the Estoril/Cascais area.
The race started with an urban race, very much in the Rat Race mould - running around the streets, performing some daft challenges. It was good for us to do something familiar.
This was followed by a skate, then a foot section over dramatic coastline to the most westerly point in mainland Europe. Then a bike and final short run back to Cascais. Straightforward, but still took 7 hours. We got all the controls and were about 50 minutes behind the charging Scandinavians who always seem to go off very fast.
The race started proper near the town of Lousa. 8am on Monday came round far too quickly, instead of being at work behind a desk; I was standing by Lousa Castle ready for the first, of many, foot sections. Being near the front early on in these races is crucial; it gives you momentum and the sense that you are in the mix. We had a great start, tucked in behind favourites Nike up the first narrow climb. A few good nav choices and we spent most of the section around the lead bunch, getting to the canyoneering in 4th place. Just the start we wanted.
Then we had the hardest section of the race, a saw-toothed horror of a bike ride, over 100km with nearly 6000m of climb. The mist was down on the tops and navigation was very hard, not helped by the fact that tracks on Portuguese maps look line fence lines on UK maps. The soundtrack for the stage was provided by massive wind turbines, heard by not seen, eerily swooshing above our heads.
This race had a different format from the usual, first to finish, with the winners being the ones with the most compulsory controls (CP’s). A tie in CP’s would bring Bonus Points (BP’s) into play. If teams were still tied then fastest to finish would be the winner. A lot of teams, including us, were expecting the course to be cleared (how wrong we were) so midway through the bike we headed off for a tough 2 hour diversion to claim a BP on the bike stage – in hindsight we need not of bothered.
The bike took us until dawn, and we were pretty tired, but happy to discover we were only an hour or so down on past champions, Nike and Orion (who had missed the BP), but actually in 2nd on CP’s and BP’s. The next section had a lot of tarmac, very hard on the feet, but gave me a chance to rest the grey cells, Nick taking my pack for a while so I could mentally recover. After clearing this stage, we got to the first supported transition. It was great to see Nic and James and have them help us (unlike the non-supported transitions), but it was daylight and we wanted to get the next bike leg out of the way before dark, so we had a quick transition and soon arrived at the kayak leg. We knew we would miss the cut off and would have to do the alternative trek, but crucially it would not mean missing any CP’s. It was more pounding for the feet, but not as bad as we expected. Getting into the next transition we found out that Orion were sleeping. As it was only 8pm, we felt it was a bit early to sleep, preferring to do so between 12 and 4 am when the body is at it’s lowest ebb. We struck out on the bike and onto a long hike-a-bike section that seemed to take forever. Culminating in a massive slog up to a 1200m high peak. On the cold and misty descent I made my first nav error, missing a junction to head off for a BP. I didn’t realise until the bottom of the hill, when I told the team, my teammates were rightly cursing me.
We were well overdue for sleep and were starting to slow up, so here we had our first sleep of the race, a cold hour in a derelict “haunted” house on some filthy mattresses – who said AR is all glamour !
After the sleep I burnt off the anger of my mistake by focussing on the nav. The adrenalin was pumping and we passed half a dozen teams whilst scorching a line across the flatter more rideable terrain. I was in the groove and loving it. Daylight brought the end of the section and the second, and last, skating section. This was a hilly skate (300m of descent!) and for this very reason before the event we had decided to take the organisation’s loan of a couple of trikes (3 wheeled scooters). Nicola and I were on trikes whilst Nick and Warren were on skates and we buddied up, Nick towing me like something out of Ben Hur and me providing the braking and stability on the downhill. It worked well for us and we even caught a few teams, a lot of them walking with their skates downhill as we sailed past.
After the skate I think we started to understand the race and sow the seeds of our success. Trekking to the kayak put in with all our kit, we decided to drop our first CP to make sure we hit the cut off at the end of the paddle. This was an excellent decision that saw us arrive at the next supported transition 90 minutes before the cut off. Little did we know that the next hour would see us make crucial decisions that would win us the race.
For some reason we had been expecting a short trekking stage, so were surprised when James said that we had a 60km trek, followed by a 160km bike before the next cut off in only 27 hours time. With the need to sleep as well, we knew we wouldn’t clear both sections so needed to cut something out. We laid the maps out on the floor and quickly saw the run wasn’t easy to shorten, so it had to be the bike.
This led to good decision number one. I saw a good option of retracing our steps on the run route then cutting across on road to pick up the bike route after the early climbs, saving a net 60km and over 1500m of ascent, but missing 3 CP’s
Then good decision number two, Warren suggested missing the Jumar CP at the beginning of the next trek. Ropework always takes time and there might be a queue. Good idea we all said. It wasn’t until we bumped into Nike later and heard that they queued for 3 hours in the cold that we realised how great an idea it was.
In the meantime we trekked on, running as much as we could and found a hay barn for a sleep. It was fantastic, so good we overslept, getting 4 hours instead of 2. It’s funny how things can go your way, the extra sleep recharged our batteries and we were now flying, passing all our rivals, Nike, Orion, Lundhags etc and by midday we were at the end of the trek.
We found out that Orion had missed a number of run CP’s and Buff had missed all of them, cementing out top 3 position. Spirits were high and we quickly set out on the Bike leg. After 90 minutes of roads we reached the first CP on our shortcut and we were back on route, we despatched the remaining controls by 9 pm getting us in to the supported transition 3 hours before the cut off.
After a bit of pasta and pizza we were out on the next short trek and down to the last long paddle. Unfortunately a mis-placed control meant we lost 20 minutes and were fortunate to find it. However once we got onto the water we enjoyed a paddle in the dark. It was a complicated lake with lots of spurs, and we were conscious that it would be difficult to navigate in the dark. However it was a bit easier than we expected and we picked up 3 CP’s out of the 4 available, confident we would pull one back on the other teams. We also slipped in a BP to bring us level with Nike and ahead of some other teams, in case we drew level on CP’s. Finishing the paddle at 7 am we got on our bikes for a short ride to the last long trek. By now it was Friday morning and we had slept for only 5 hours since Monday morning and had none in the last 27 hours. Mentally the wheels started to fall off and we stopped at a café for me to have a nap and some food. A 30 min break was just the ticket and we left feeling better, finishing the bike and still being 2 hours in front of the cut-off.
We had heard that both Nike and Orion had just made the previous cut-off with minutes to spare and Lundhags had missed it. Some people were saying that they wouldn’t make the cut off we had just made – perhaps we could win this we thought!
Jubilant, we set off on the next trek, careful to follow the instructions of the organisers to stick to “Marked Trails”. After the first set of hills we dropped into a small town, we were thirsty and hungry so stopped at a café to eat all his cakes and drink some Cola. We wouldn’t make all 4 CP’s on this route. The last CP was a good one to drop, so after one more hill and some of the notorious “Stone Walls” the organiser warned us about, we got to the next transition.
We had been told that Nike had made the cut-off against the odds so the elation of earlier had gone and we knew that we were reliant on a mistake, but Nike doesn’t make those, right? So we were stunned to be told that they were already at transition and had missed all the CP’s on the last trek, this put us in the lead. Our melted brains couldn’t cope so we sought confirmation.
We left the transition not sure, but immediately I felt my Brain was mush and needed sleep. Back we went to the amazement of some, an astonished Michael Lindstrom from Team Explore said “You are leading the World Champs, you cannot sleep!”, “That is why we sleep” we replied.
After an hour’s useful rest and we headed out on the tough last bike. Navigation was hard, as it had been all race and with the mist down again, progress slow. Then it decided to rain (just as we got to a late night café), after too many hours we got to the last stage having dropped a CP to make sure we had time for the coasteering. In the end we had plenty of time, as it was just a walk along a beautiful beach to the finish line. Even along here we convinced ourselves that we hadn’t won. It was only in the last few hundred metres that we got confirmation and the emotion could flood out.
We were World Champions, the first Brits to do it, and against a strong field including many ex-champions. Nike congratulated us on the finish line, showing what great racers they are. With the score format there was a crowd of Brits at the finish, Team AR Mag and Gill Watson to name just a few. With the Union Jack in hand this was all too much for us chaps and we were blubbing away, only Nicola being made of stronger stuff.
This was truly a team effort, with our aces being some strategic heads, stout hearts and the best support crew in the race.
In the past 12 years of racing, nothing can compare to the emotion I felt having finally achieved what I thought was an unachievable goal. Just goes to show what you can do if you stick at it…
