Kielder Results

It is nearly a week since Kielder Marathon and I have had the full week off running to recover. I picked up one or two niggles training for this race and I want to give them time to settle down before training hard again. However, I am going down to run with the club tomorrow morning. It was the National Cross Country Relays at Cumbernauld today, I was sorry to miss that but hopefully it means everyone will be taking it easy tomorrow.

A week on and the Kielder results are still incomplete. There is no age group or club information included. I contacted the organisers who said they won't be updating them now but as they have had a few queries about this they will definitely be including this information next year. Not a great response but fair enough it is a new race and there are one or tow lessons to be learnt. It was a lovely course to run and I was pleased I decided to go and run it.

The race was won by Midlands based Kenyan Zachary Kihara in 2.29.06 under a minute ahead of Polish runner Bartek Mazerski and fellow Kenyan Julius Kimeu in third. Darran Bilton from Leeds easily took the vet category win, the V45 finishing in an amazing 2.34.31. Ultra distance mountain runner and world 100km champion, Lizzie Hawker was first women in in 2.58.22. This course must have suited the ultra runners with Scottish 50k champion Marcus Scotney finishing 7th in 2.42.29. I knew at the start that I had no chance of winning my age group when I spotted Sedgefield's Gary Hetherington lining up. I was flying earlier in the year and ran a great time at Dentdale to finish 10th but Gary was almost 5 minutes ahead of me. It was no surprise then that Gary took the V50 title, finishing 11th in 2.51.58. The lack of age group data means I can't be sure where I finished in my age group - I suspect 2nd or 3rd but, taking into account my limited training and the challenging course I was pleased with 33rd place and 3.13.42.

I am going to have a few weeks easy running now but my next race is likely to be the Glasgow Uni 5 miler in two weeks time.