A summer of running in the Peak District
This year I
have only managed one caving trip, the White Scar trip on the annual dinner
weekend. However, I have been doing a
fair bit of running. I have been
dabbling for a while but last year joined the “Smiley Paces’, a women’s running
club in Sheffield. I went along a few
times and, it not being a very official sort of club, paid by £2 subs, signed
up to the Facebook page and was in. I progressed from the beginners to the
regular group, aided by lots of chat and cake and a fantastic group of friendly
women. A winter of pounding the streets of southwest Sheffield (not so nice)
and head-torch runs up Porter valley (much better) meant that by spring 2013
progress was good.
As cities go,
Sheffield is just about the best place to be a runner (I may well be biased).
Famously hilly, the Peak District national park comes into the city boundary
and the western suburbs sit high up on the edge of the moors. The city parks
are proper wild corridors of ancient woodland leading out to the moors, not
bandstand and carpet bedding type places.
All the local running clubs seem to put on at least one summer fell
race, and the Peak District villages also hold races for their well dressing
weeks. I had a look through the calendar and got tempted by the thought of
doing a fell run. Oh no, I thought, I’m turning into my mother! However, I decided to bite the bullet, order
my Smiley Paces vest, and enter my first race.
Burbage
Skyline. Tuesday, 6th May.
5.8 miles, 1201ft ascent.
Over 300
people a year enter the Burbage skyline, which for a local midweek evening
event is a pretty impressive. My friend
Judith and I drove out to the Fox House pub on a beautiful clear May evening to
join the back of a very long registration queue. Looking at the vests of the other competitors
I was amazed to see people had come from a few counties away - not 15 minutes
up the road like us. We were herded into
an old quarry track and people checked their watches and GPS’s and hopped from
foot to foot waiting until finally we were off.
Everyone surged down the slope like a stampede of buffalo. Thundering
down to Burbage Brook, the runner in front of me tripped and fell – almost
getting foot prints across his back as I narrowly missed running straight over
him. I wasn’t sure what the race
etiquette is for when people fall, but judging by everyone else, the thing to
do is to shout ‘alright mate?’ over your shoulder while running off. I had told
myself beforehand to treat it just like a Sunday run, and take it steady, but
finding I could actually keep up with people, and even overtake a few was very
exciting and spurred me on. Struggling
up to Mother Cap we could see the front runners already on their way up Higgar
Tor – the difference between the average and the best is enormous (although the
difference between the average and Joe Public is probably even greater). The pull up Higgar Tor was thigh burning,
steepening to a hand over hand clamber up the rocks. I had been warned to take care on the
‘plummet’ off Higgar but I found this exhilarating –brakes off, trust your
shoes and drop like a stone. Down
through the woods then a long steady uphill to upper Burbage Bridge. This was hard – pick a boulder, run to it,
walk till the next boulder, stagger to the next, walk, run, but just keep
going. Once up on the top of Burbage north edge the way on was a steady
undulating sheep track in the heather - small feet are really an advantage for
scampering along the little tracks and hopping from stone to stone. I even
managed to overtake a few people on this stretch including a couple of Dark
Peak club vests (the hard men and women of the peak district running world).But
the effort had taken its toll and by the final half mile along a wide flat
bridleway I had slowed to a jog and a steady stream of people sprinted past me,
including most of the people I had overtaken earlier. I was really exhilarated at the finish. I loved running in the club vest - complete
strangers came up and clapped me on the back with a ‘well run, Smiley’ or just
came over for a chat. The midges were
hungry so we escaped the beautiful golden evening for a pint in the Fox House
and watched the prizes being presented.
Afterwards Sally Fawcett, also in Smiley Paces, and second lady overall
came over and said ‘the mistake you’ve made is that you’ve done the nicest fell
run in the calendar on the most beautiful evening of the year for your first
race. It’s downhill all the way for you now!’
Around this
time, an email pinged into my inbox one morning at work and I found myself
entering the Nine Edges – a 21mile race across the Peak District that I’d been
eyeing up for a while. I had only run 7
miles by this point but I reckoned that with over 4 months to train and a
spectacular route traversing nine of the Peak’s gritstone edges it wasn’t
impossible.
Totley Moor
Fell Race, Tuesday 21st May, 5.2miles, 1444ft ascent
A fortnight
on from Burbage and a very different evening saw a car full of us heading over
to Totley, in southwest Sheffield, headlights on in thick drizzle and feeling
cold. I used to live here and it’s a
really interesting area where moorland with red deer and steep birch forest
comes right down to meet suburbia. The
race starts immediately with a killer hill, up to the top of Totley moor with
views across to Hope Valley, before looping back down. The sting in the tail is just when you think
you are on the home straight, the route goes halfway back up the hill again followed
by a perilously steep downhill and then a short road section. Jelly legs all round. I narrowly beat one of the other Smiley girls
in this race, but only because she had to stop to retrieve her shoe from a bog.
The Hallam
Chase, Tuesday 28th May, 3.25 miles, 800 feet of ascent
There is a
rule that you can only do this race if you are a member of a bona fide
affiliated Sheffield running club, which the Smiley Paces isn’t. However there were a couple of reasons why I
really wanted to do this one. Firstly
it’s the oldest fell race in the world, or oldest continuously run fell race or
oldest handicap fell race or some similar historical accolade that’s lost in
the mists of time. Secondly, it starts from the Hallam cricket/& football
ground, which is on the next road to our house and if I look out of our attic
window I can see the starting line. How
many people can say the world’s oldest fell race starts practically on their
doorstep? Happily, a quick phone call the race organiser gave me the go ahead. Being a handicap race you submit some race
times in advance then set off in reverse order –tortoises first, hares
last - the idea being that you all
finish together. In ye olden days this
race must have been in moorland but now the route passes through housing
estates, fields and a wood and crosses two busy A roads. Only 50 or so people
enter the race each year and if it were a caving trip it would be described as
‘an esoteric gem’. The route is simple -
from the cricket ground, nose dive straight down the side of Rivelin valley,
clamber back up the other side to Stannington Church and then reverse the whole
process. At 800ft of ascent in only 3
miles it packs quite a punch and was a real rollercoaster of a run. Wild horses
wouldn’t have dragged a sprint finish out of me as I staggered back into the
cricket field. The race was sponsored by
a local solicitors firm who had bought in a generous amount of alcohol for the
prizes – so much so that the race organiser had to make up a few more
categories to offload it all including ‘anyone who thinks they deserve a prize
and hasn’t got one yet’. I was pleased
to come home with a nice bottle of wine for first lady in the 35-40
category. I was less smug few days later
and the results came out and I found that there were only 2 of us in that
category, the other girl actually ran faster, I just had a better handicap, and
that race category doesn’t normally exist.
Anyway, it was nice to take part in some of our more obscure local
history.
EdaleFell
Race, Sunday 9th June.
4.7miles, 1319ft ascent.
Not a good
start to this race, which took place in the first week of the July
heatwave. I got stuck in heavy traffic
heading to the Edale show and with barely time to register had to sprint to the
start line, a good half mile uphill from registration, arriving gasping for a
drink and boiling hot with less than a minute to spare. The initial climb is a steep rocky staircase
to Ringing Roger, and the gritstone slabs of the path were spattered with
splashes of sweat and froths of spit from overheating runners. I could barely wheeze, never mind reply to the
encouraging ‘Go Smiley!’ from the marshall.
Reaching the top we contoured along the edge of Kinder plateau in the
brilliant sunshine, sweat running into my eyes and dust kicking up from the
baked hard peat. The route traverses
round to Grindlow Knoll, followed by the inevitable plunge to the village
showground and the blissful sight of the water station. The heat and exertion must have addled my
brain as I went into the show tent for a cup of tea and came out £20 quid
lighter having purchased a yak wool blanket from a Nepalese fundraising stall.
The day after this race I could hardly walk.
The ‘hands on knees’ push uphill, combined with the rock hard ground
didn’t do my back any good at all and I had to take a few weeks break.
With the Nine
Edges at the back of my mind, and aware that I’d been getting sidetracked by
short fast races instead of increasing my mileage, I did a few long slow
training runs over the summer. My
favourite route along the edge of Rivelin valley to Wyming Brook; resin scented
pinewoods springy underfoot. An early
morning run from Sheffield to Hathersage, thinking how lucky I was to be
running through fields of buttercups in the sunshine with Hathersage church
clock striking ten and the whole of the weekend still ahead of me. An evening run along Derwent Edge in low
cloud with one working head torch between us, getting cramp, and losing all
sense of distance in the mist and dark until finally staggering back to the car
at 10pm. 2013 has been a summer with
some good memories.
Totley
Exterminator, Sunday 1st September. 16 miles., 4232ft ascent
Fortunately I
didn’t know too much about this race before I entered it (although the clue is
in the name) – I knew it was 16miles but when I downloaded my Garmin afterwards
I was amazed I had managed the ascent; five big uphills, one after the other.
This was five miles longer than I’d run before and the pace was faster than I
would have liked – I was running with my friend, Ruth, who knew the route so it
was worth keeping up. Despite the
relentless climbing, it’s an interesting route - not that I saw much of the
scenery as I had my work cut out trying to maintain the pace. The marshal’s
handed out flapjacks at Higgar Tor - delicious but my mouth was too dry to
swallow them. I got soaked and scratched
bashing through the bracken under Stanage popular end, ran right through a
group of ravers in Millstone Quarries, packing up after an all night party, and
did most of the descent to Padley Gorge on my backside. What was good about this race was I struggled
for the first 10 miles but then got into my stride, boding well for the Nine
Edges. As I ran the last mile over Totley Moor, the Red Arrows flew overhead on
their way to an event at Chatsworth House, which felt suitably
celebratory. I was pleased with my time,
although the winners came in a full hour ahead of me.
The Nine
Edges, Saturday 14th September, 21 miles, 2930ft ascent
Time for the
big one! I woke up feeling sick with
nerves, and I wished I hadn’t built this up as the main event of the summer.
After registering at Fairholmes, nearly 150 runners jostled under Derwent dam
until the starting whistle put us out of midge-infested misery. Most of the route’s ascent takes place in the
first few miles, steadily rising from the reservoir to the shoulder then a
second push up onto Derwent Edge. I was
still having niggling back pain since the Edale race so tried keep a good
upright posture on the uphills (more like a Masai, less like Mrs Overall) but
the peer pressure is there when everyone is beetling past you using that
special hands on knees walk that fell runners use to power uphill. Derwent Edge
is by far the most interesting edge of the route - high and dramatic with
spacious views across the moors, and a dot-to-dot path linking a chain of rock
tors. After crossing the A57 and the
second checkpoint we pushed onto Stanage High Neb and had a lovely surprise as
my friend Jayne had run out from Redmires to join us for a short stretch. The
latter section of Stanage was the hardest bit of the whole run for me. Having passed the High Neb trig point, the
edge dips and curves and you can see the entirety of the next few miles
stretching out ahead of you, deceptively uphill. I had to stop and take some Ibuprofen for
backache and I was aware that I was holding Judith back. I also realized that I had accidentally
switched off my Garmin while taking off my rucksack at the first checkpoint;
very annoying. Jelly babies and a fun
size bounty bar at Burbage north didn’t help, and through Burbage valley I felt
slow. Miraculously, after Burbage, the
Bounty bars kicked in and friends were waiting at Longshaw to cheer us on,
which also gave me a real lift. I felt
really strong through Longshaw and we made good progress to the Grouse pub and
along Froggatt Edge. We kept overtaking
and then being over taken by another couple of competitors with a large
rucksack – turns out they was doing the more hardcore option where you not only
run the route but do a climb on each of the edges. For the early routes they just soloed a
diff/v diff but top roped for the last few edges, aware they were tired and
might easily peel off. Curbar edge had a
niggling uphill section, which was disproportionately knackering for its size,
and the route along Baslow edge is just a cart track but by now we had done
over 18 miles and I knew we’d cracked it.
Running through the trees under Birchens Edge I could suddenly hear the
road - almost an anti-climax as I hadn’t expected it so soon. I did my best effort to sprint the last few
hundred metres through the woods until the path spat me out onto the road, and
to the finish at the Robin Hood pub.
The race is a
fundraiser for Edale mountain rescue team and the organization of the whole
event was excellent. The marshal’s were
unfailing cheerful and encouraging, and finishers get a beer token for the pub
and a coach back to the start. We sat
around in the sun, drinking our pints and clapping home everyone we knew and
most people we didn’t. Apart from
getting severe cramp under my ribs bending down to untie my laces and everyone
around thinking I was having a heart attack, I didn’t feel too bad considering
how far we’d run.
I finished
off the summer with the Stanage Struggle, a comparatively short and sweet six
miler the following Sunday, and that’s about it for the fell racing year. I’ve done things I wouldn’t have thought
myself capable of, discovered new areas of the Peaks and seen old ones from a
different perspective, and made some good friends along the way. Most of all I’ve been overwhelmed by the
friendliness and enthusiasm of fell runners and been welcomed into a sport I
thought had the potential to be a bit snooty about beginners
just turning up and having a go. So, what next?
For next year I’d to explore more routes in the wilder Peak
District. The upper reaches of Howden
look intriguing, and I’ve barely touched Kinder. Roll on 2014.
Claire
Haycock (Wilkinson)