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Butterwick Hospice 10k – Hamsterley Forest

by Sarah J.

http://www.butterwick.org.uk

What happened to that lovely run streak I had going at the start of the week?! I had it all planned out…I would run at least 5k every day from Monday to Wednesday, have Thursday off, do a gym session on Friday, have Saturday off, then hit the Butterwick 10k on Sunday. Monday and Tuesday went vaguely according to plan, and then work happened. The machine went bang on Wednesday afternoon and it was after midnight before I left for home, back in the next morning for a full day and I was out like a light almost as soon as I got in the door on Thursday evening. Friday was just me playing catch-up 🙂 So, we arrive at Sunday having only done half the exercise we were expecting and praying for rain so it might be slightly cooler.

Having run at Hamsterley Forest before, I had some inkling of the type of terrain likely to be involved in this run – it was a bit much to hope that it would be along the road at the bottom of the valley and back, and therefore flat, and my inklings were confirmed by one of the Bounders posting on Facebook asking if anyone else was doing this hilly one today…When you’ve spent the last week struggling to run 5k on a flat, 10k of hills is the last thing you want to think about facing, and I know how big and long some of the hills at Hamsterley can be! If I could make it round in one piece, it would however be a good confidence booster to reassure me that even if I finish as roasted as a Sunday lunch chicken, I can get round and break that 5k wall I seem to have put up lately.

We got to Hamsterley Forest in plenty of time to register, and they had something I haven’t seen for a run before – usually the timing chip is on the race number or needs cable-tying to your laces, these were padded ankle bracelets like tracking devices just incase we left the beaten track and tried to take a short-cut so we could win all the things or something…

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Color Obstacle Rush Newcastle – Guest Post!

by Sarah J.

http://www.colorobstaclerush.com

Today, we have our first guest post! My lovely sister came up to do the Color Obstacle Rush with J and I this weekend and has kindly agreed to walk you through our day 🙂

Over to F…

In summary: We started clean, then did some stuff, J was mean and kept throwing stuff at us but we got revenge later. By the end we looked like 4 year olds who had got into the paint box.

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Newburn River Run – 10.5km

by Sarah J.

With this race organised by the Elswick Harriers covering J & I’s regular 10k loop basically perfectly, it would have been a criminal one to miss! We normally run it from Wylam up to Newburn, and then back the other side past the golf course, but this started at Newburn, went along our normal first half, which is very flat, and then came back past the golf course in the opposite direction to the one we normally do this leg in. I knew there was a reason we did it the way we normally do! There’s a few small hills on the golf course and our route covers most of them in the downhill direction, which of course meant that going this way they were uphill instead. Ho-hum, variety is the spice of life and all that.

I was sporting the Bounders colours for this one – mainly because I know that there are several lovely people who take photos of the Bounders at events so I’d a good chance at getting a pic of J and I pootling along – I was correct! LD caught us at the start and the finish 😉

Photo by LD of the Blackhill Bounders

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Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon – Liverpool

by Sarah J.

Today, I have officially knocked off a major milestone in my running journey! I’ve completed my first half marathon event, and run further than I ever have before 🙂 I entered the Rock ‘n’ Roll series half marathon in Liverpool at the start of the year looking for a big event to help carry me round, and one that was as flat as possible as battling the distance is hard enough! You’ll see on the elevation graph that Liverpool isn’t as flat as I was hoping…there’s a few 50m climbs in there I didn’t see coming, but they were all relatively shallow and fortunately all in the first half so it was almost entirely downhill for the second half! I must admit, a run like this is the best way to see a new city – there was no traffic because the roads were closed for the event, the route was designed to take you past or through the monuments and parks, and I saw far more of it than I would have done had I been walking it! The roads which had caused such baffled vexation yesterday were a breeze on the well-signed and fenced off course today! I’d have been hard pressed to go the wrong way with the number of marshalls too!

My race breakfast consisted of croissants with jam, watermelon and orange juice – nothing too heavy and hopefully a moderate mix of early access sugars and some carbs…and I pinched some cupcake mini muffin things for later. Gotta love somewhere that serves up double chocolate and blueberry mini muffins as part of its breakfast menu! Then I dragged P out of bed and he came with me to find the corrals at the start 🙂 They’d put some weird one way systems in, it turned out where we were going was literally right outside the front door of our hotel, but because we’d gone out the back door we had to walk round three other buildings and a giant ferris wheel to get to them. I have no idea how many people there are, I heard 8000 over the tannoy at the end but I don’t know if that was total runners or just one of the events as they had the full marathon running at the same time, or the whole weekend as they also had a 5k yesterday, and a kids’ one miler today!

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Gannin’ Along the Scotswood Road To See the Blaydon Races!

by Sarah J.

I went to Blaydon races,
Twas on the 9th of June,
Twenty Hundred and Fifteen,
On a summer’s afternoon!

Now that we’ve got that out of our system (and if you haven’t, you can listen to ‘The Blaydon Races’ on audioBoom).

The Blaydon Races is probably second only to the Great North Run for notoriety in the North-East, outside of the running club calendars at least – probably because of the inconvenience to the general public for road closures! The race is held on the 9th of June every year, regardless of what day of the week this falls on – and runs along one of the biggest roads into Newcastle, usually about the same time many commuters are wanting to use it to get home…tradition comes first right?! The race has been organised since its inaugration in its current form, by the Blaydon Harriers since 1981 – and has very strict intake numbers, which are always exceeded by the number of applicants!

Not being ‘in’ the running club scene quite yet when the original applications openend up, I was oblivious to the places opening up – but there was an issue with the system and it ended up crashing – meaning the last 300 places were available on a different date after everything had been sorted again. This small doorway in, I had picked up on – and was sitting at the computer waiting from about 08:30 that morning – entry opened at 9am. I hit refresh exactly as the computer clock clicked over – and was straight into the waiting list, already at place 40 something or something like that so they must have gone lightning fast!

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Bottoms Up Cup – Washington

by Sarah J.

This was the first race organised by the newly reformed Washington Running Club – who disbanded in the early 1990’s. They’ve been trotting round Washington since September last year and now wanted to take the next step and get some training courses for some of their members. How does a running club fundraise? They organise a run and get all the local runners to pour money into their coiffers 😉 Much like the George Ogle run I did this week, this was also a memorial event – for Stephen Bottoms of the original Washington Running Club, and could run a half marathon in an insane 80 minutes :O This is mindboggling for someone who would be over the moon with 150 minutes!

£5 entry for UA affiliated members and helping another club get further off the ground? What’s not to go for? I can squeeze another race into May…which had a grand total of 1 weekend out of the 5 without at least one race event! I’d posted on the Bounders facebook page that morning asking if anyone else was going – knowing many people were at the Edinburgh Marathon Festival for the weekend and kicking butt doing half and full marathons today while I was doing my measley 3 miles! 4 takers including myself – 2 guys doing photography (I think on behalf of the Trail Outlaws who were also helping with the run organisation?!) and one other runner – a dedicated run england, parkrun and great run local attendee, but this was to be her first race event!

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George Ogle Memorial Race – 9.1km

by Sarah J.

http://www.blackhillbounders.com/

I did the George Ogle Memorial Race for the first time last night, it’s organised by PB Fitness in memory of a local runner who died in 2010, and goes around the Derwenthaugh park between Rowlands Gill and Winlaton Mill. It had been raining all afternoon – hurray for not hot, not so hurray for soggy running! Fortunately it had decided to blow over about an hour before the start and was getting quite sunny but still cool by race time. I had a surprise waiting for me at the start line – J had come to hold all my safety pins and cheer me on which was quite absolutely lovely of her (AND it’s now 1pm and she’s not hassling me for a blog entry yet! Unheard of!). She found a Bounders puppy to spoil while she was waiting for me to pootle my way round.

Photo by LD of the Blackhill Bounders

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Pier 2 Pier Run 2015 – 11km

by Sarah J.

http://www.sunderlandstrollers.co.uk

The weekend just gone was a very active one – not only did I have Gelt Gladiator on the Saturday, I’d booked myself in for the Pier to Pier Run on the Sunday. P has officially declared me mad, but it seems to be such a big feature in the local running calendar that when I saw it was coming up I had to give it a go! I see that many P2P 2014 bandanas around it looks like everyone had a go last year!

The run goes from South Shields pier, along the clifftops and beaches right down to Sunderland pier for the finish line and is organised by the Sunderland Strollers. Don’t let the name fool you! I’ve seen the Sunderland Strollers at several races before and they have some very fast members! I’d booked a seat on the Bounders coach a few weeks ago, but as the time drew near, decided that I didn’t want to lose the whole day to the race – the coach was leaving Consett at 08:15 (fine, I left about the same time myself!), but not coming back until 15:30 from Sunderland as the guys were hitting a pub afterwards. The Bounders have been described on the radio before as ‘a drinking club with a running problem’! They’re a lovely bunch anyway 🙂 So, I decided as I needed food and the shops shut at 4pm, that I would take my own car as I should then be home for 2pm. I’d set the satnav for a carpark near the pier, but to be honest could have found it myself if someone said ‘drive towards South Shields and then at every single roundabout ever, go straight over it’, seriously, there are so many roundabouts in South Shields and it felt like I was constantly hearing “At the roundabout, take the second exit”! Say something else Eddie!

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Gelt Gladiator Assault Course – 5 (and a bit!) km

by Sarah J.

*This is going to be a long one, go and get a coffee, maybe a biscuit for sustenance – I’ll wait for you*

Well, it’s finally here, today’s the day the teddy bears have their piiiiiiic-nic! And the weather forecast for said picnic?

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. I mean wind. Cloudy and windy. That. And the forecast was correct! It was indeed, cloudy and windy (bitterly cold when you’re standing around in wet clothing) and there were showers, but fortunately only on the drive there…or from the fire hose at the end.

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Great Manchester Run

by Sarah J.

I booked the Great Manchester Run at the start of the year when I was trying to fill my calendar with at least one event a month to try and give myself something to aim for through the year and keep me getting my trainers on. P & I were originally going to book a weekend in Manchester and do it together, but it was booked before he went onto shift – and typically his first day shift was the same as the run, so rather than knocking myself out trying to drive down (and parking in Manchester centre when half the roads are shut?! No thank you!), I booked the train down and back and headed off after dropping P off at work.

Getting to Manchester was no problem at all, unsurprisingly the trains are rather empty at 9am on a Sunday morning, and knowing where I was going to get to the race start and the baggage drop off – and how to get round the busy race start zone to get to the bag drop at the other end really helped too! The first wave was heading off just as I got to the race area, and I had to actually cross the race route after they’d passed to get to where I was going. I’ve not used the baggage drop services at a race before really – I left my waterproof behind at the baggage place at the Thirsk 10, but that was it. I was a bit iffy about leaving my bag in the room – there wasn’t any real control or labelling, only people with race numbers were allowed in but that was it. Being a paranoid android, I had my phone, wallet and keys in a waist pouch with me and just left a change of clothes and book behind in my backpack.

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