Hope Winter Fell Race 40/221

This is the first year that this race has been run in Winter, and I loved the summer race which had great memories from 2015 due to it being held on the hottest day of the year. The winter race was basically the exact reverse of the summer race - what a great idea !!! In the run up to this race I'd had a week in the Lakes (2*4.5h runs plus 2*90min runs) plus some short hard MTB local efforts trying to get a local KOM - and failing miserably! This would normally be a reasonable prep for me - plenty of running with a taper in the run up to it. For some reason, the race didn't quite pan out as well as I'd hoped !

Andy, Nick, Rob, Ed, Helen and me - whilst Ruth was warming up in her car!!

On the day, I shared a lift up with Ruth and Andy and got there with enough time to warm up checking out the first hill. Legs felt good, so all systems go!

Once the race started I settled into a comfortable pace - well, what I thought was a comfortable pace anyway - when the first hill began in earnest I just maxed out sadly and it was a good 20 mins or so before I got any sort of power back. Annoying! With hindsight, it looks like I didn't warm up enough - I only did half effort up one hill. I'd normally do about 3 efforts. Never mind!

As it happened tho - the race was absolutely brilliant ! The weather was perfect - cold when standing still but warm when running. The path through the forest at the back of WIn Hill was a nightmare for me - I'd still not regained power by this point so I found all of that hard. But once we'd plopped out onto Win Hill for the second time - the long fast semi technical descent was just a fantastic blast - I even caught the 3 guys in front of me - that never happens (maybe I was further back in the field thinking about it!).

A good turnout for Belper with Nick, Andy and Rob all doing their first fell race and loving it by all accounts! Nice to have a coffee stop and debrief on the way home too.

Results here 40th out of 221, so only top 18% - worst performance for a while seemingly.
Strava here