{"id":3537,"date":"2014-03-07T21:51:12","date_gmt":"2014-03-07T21:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/?p=3537"},"modified":"2022-04-11T21:33:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T20:33:00","slug":"belvoir-challenge-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/belvoir-challenge-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Belvoir Challenge 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poor planning left me with nothing much to do last weekend, so I drove to Harby at ridiculous-o’clock on Saturday morning in the hope of picking up a cancellation place on the Belvoir Challenge<\/a>. After an abysmal showing at Charnwood Hills a few weeks ago (a defeat so ignominious it wasn’t even mentioned on this blog), I hoped to redeem myself in the arena of sticky Leicestershire clag.<\/p>\n

Obtaining a place wasn’t difficult, and as the Barrow contingent lined up at the start Rob seemed to be more confident than I that my performance would be adequate. We stayed together for the first mile or so, with Rob acting as a good influence on my pace, before Adrian joined us and we kicked up half a gear. A direct route through a muddy puddle (deeper than anticipated) saw us pass a lot of people who were pussy-footing around the sides, and before long we reached the first control at 6.4 miles.<\/p>\n

\"About

About mile six. \u00a9 John Perring Photography 2014<\/p><\/div>\n

From here, Adrian pulled ahead slowly until he finally lost me at the climb onto Terrace Hills. By this point I was on my own, and it remained that way right until the finish another six miles away. The solitude meant I could focus on going at my own pace, and I pushed hard for consistency and something I could sustain. Descending from the hill I hit tarmac into the village, and accelerated for a glorious sprint across the finish line. The only flaw with this plan was that I was in Stathern, not Harby, and there were still another couple of miles until the finish!<\/p>\n

Sure enough I eventually crossed the line in 2:08:03<\/a>, which I was quite pleased with. Adrian was three-and-a-bit minutes ahead, and just missed out on the top ten. I came in 14th overall. It’s difficult to tell how many people were running versus walking, but the club affiliations seem to run out at about 400 people. So not a bad result! Rob wasn’t far behind, and there were excellent performances from other Barrow runners too. The whole thing was topped off nicely by some lovely cake.<\/p>\n

So other than the potential for a mild case of leptospirosis<\/a>, it was a good morning. A repeat entry might be dependent on the presence of proper fell races on the same weekend next year, but I’d certainly look favourably on entering again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poor planning left me with nothing much to do last weekend, so I drove to Harby at ridiculous-o’clock on Saturday morning in the hope of picking up a cancellation place on the Belvoir Challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3540,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1011,1012,1013],"class_list":["post-3537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-outdoors","tag-barrow-runners","tag-belvoir-challenge","tag-harby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}