Jura Fell Race

A decent turn out for this classic race, we arrived on the Friday to find the paps clear of cloud and perfect running conditions but even as we lounged about on the midge refuge/pier the coulds built. By morning the rain, low cloud and wind was well and truly in. With the cloud level standing at around 500 ft almost the whole run was done with very poor visibility. To make matters worse the course was far wetter than last year and even in clear vis the times would have been much slower.

The route traverses 7 hills including the horrifically rough yet slippy when wet paps of Jura. Most of these hills recieve few visitors so the paths are faint and numerous nav errors occured. Six times race winner Ian Holmes overtook Chris Near and myself (Iain R) at least 3 times and went on to win in a time of 3:49:50. Chris and I ran almost the whole route together whilst we (partially) shared the nav, Chris's expertise was called on a few times to keep us on track, we made few errors and moved steadily around the course, had we not made an error chasing other runners coming off the last pap we'd have gone under the magical 4 hr mark, which this year only 2 runners managed (a record low for the course), as it was we finished 4th (me) and 8th (Chris) in 4:06 and 4:09 respectively. Noel Craine nursing his injured ankle finished 35th in 4:51.

Most runners were a good 30 minutes to an hour down on previous years times, apart from Ali Thomas who amazingly only dropped 5 minutes on last years time.

The womens race was won by Angela Mudge in 4:23, with Jackie Lee 3rd (4:51), Sarah Ridgway 4th (4:53), Ali Thomas (5:15) and 2nd LV40, and Pilar Near finished in 6:02. 151 finished out of nearly 190 runners. The strong womens turn out gave them 1st female team on the day.

Cracking weekend as always.

Results: http://www.jurafellrace.org.uk/results/2009.htm