The cold returns. Snow Joke.

What happened there then? There we were, quite happily mooching our way through a few warmer days, the sun was out (occasionally), the lapwings and curlews were coming back the moors, daffodils were up, and pigeons were making out on the lawn. The east wind came back with a bit of a vengeance and a fair amount of the white stuff. So much so that pretty much every race on the calendar got cancelled this weekend. Pretty much all… but not ALL.

Grindleford Gallop 10k

Matt Crompton managed to get over the Snake, and indeed back again before the weather really came in. A good thing too as nothing was going to make the Gallop organisers cancel their race… and when you’ve paid for a race, you don’t want a refund, you want it to happen. Thankfully you don’t have to listen to my witterings about what might or might not have happened because Matt sent over a lovely missive about the day:

For your round-up today. I think Grindleford Gallop was the only local race to survive the weather. It’s a 21ish mile trail race to raise funds for the primary school in the village. Sells out in a few minutes usually. Always a fantastic race, taking in villages like Eyam and Great Longstone, the Monsal Trail, Chatsworth and finishing with a run along Curbar and Froggat Edges. Yesterday saw brutal conditions including blizzards, wind and more mud than I’ve ever known on the course. All made for a tough but fun race. I finished in 3hr 28, and came 76th out of about 320 runners. It’s one of those really lovely, friendly races that I can heartily recommend.

Thanks for that Matt.

Oldham Way

So theoretically it was going to be the Oldham Way Ultra this weekend, a bit of a show down that we were all looking forward to. It was indeed snowed off, so ordinarily wouldn’t be included in a weekend race report. However, Will Mather took it upon himself to join with a group of others to do the Double…. starting on Friday evening, the idea was to run the route overnight, getting to the start in time for porridge, a cuppa tea and maybe a change of clothes before heading out again for the actual race. So far, so “normal”.

Luckily…. Will did a write up on facebook and he wrote me a little missive as well….

I did the Oldham way Double this weekend did a bit of a write up on my Facebook page we were on target to do the first lap (40mile) in 10hours but the weather turned even worse at about 2am and we ended up taking 12 and half hours and then the race got cancelled so couldn’t start the second lap.

“second lap”. Yes. Quite…. The man is a monster. For those of you not on facebook – here is the authorised account….

“There were 8 of us starting on Saturday at 7pm to complete a the 40mile loop by the start of the actual race at 7am Sunday we were on target to finish in plenty of time but then the wind really picked up as well as snow, we were having white outs and couldn’t see any more than 10yards in front of us so ended up a little off course at times. So with icicles hanging from our eyelashes and hands that where blocks of ice we battled our way over dozens of high drifts back to race HQ to find out the race had been called off. We could only do 40miles but to go back out would of been crazy”

Damn fine effort Will.

Parkrun

Surprisingly Parkrun was not cancelled this week in Glossop – the weather held off for just enough time for everyone to run around it with great jollity and happiness. No new PB’s this week, and there were other people running in other parkruns as well…. as ever, consolidated report is here….

Other Stuff

I know that pretty much everyone knows- it has been on facebook, and also on the front of the main Glossopdale webpage, but our great friend John Hewitt passed away this week just gone. There are myriad photos and stories around, but I thought it might be nice to have a small collation of images here, this week.