XC Season kicks off & Pentland Skyline Record Attempt

For me the start of October means two things: the start of the Scottish Cross Country Season and the end of the hill running season. After a tough exam on Friday morning I was keen for some hard running to clear my mind, and I definitely got it with two very contrasting races over the weekend.

Saturday meant a trip back to my home terrain for the East of Scotland XC Relays. I really enjoy cross country racing and the relays are a great way to start the season. The course at Meadowmill isn’t the most inspiring with around two thirds of each 4km leg being on flat playing fields with the rest on a hard packed ploughed field but they are playing fields I know well as they are five minutes jog from my parent’s house. I’ve no idea how many laps of them I have run in my life but I doubt many people have run more!

I took on the second leg for HBT. Stevie Cairns ran well to come in 5^th and send me out about 100m down but only a couple of metres ahead of John Newsom of Central. I didn’t want to let John get on terms with me so I started pretty hard to try and build a gap. I glanced at my Garmin after 500m and saw I’d averaged 2:45/km so far! With a start that fast it was always going to hurt at some point but I managed to stay strong and pull us up a couple of places. My time of 12:11 for the 4.1km was the second fastest of the day but 20s down on Iain Donnan who flew round on last leg. A good start to the season though as last year I only ran 12:42 for the same course and still went on to win a couple of league races. The team finished well to come in 7^th: a decent result since we didn’t have a full strength squad out.

After the race it was back to a pasta feast to get fuelled up for the main target of the weekend: a crack at a fast time for the Pentland Skyline. The Skyline is an iconic race in these parts as it visits 14 of the Pentland Hills which we train on regularly. At 27km & nearly 1900m climb it’s also a real physical test.

Link to race map

Last year I ran the race as a hard training run and came 2^nd behind Oleg, who ran very well to get within 3 minutes of the record. The record is held by Andy Kitchin who has at various times in the past been my role model, rival, team mate, coach, team manager, landlord and even business partner. After we failed to beat his record for the highest place British team at Jukola I decided I wanted to have a serious crack at taking this record away for him and my surprise win at the Two Breweries a fortnight ago told me I was in decent shape and I had a chance of doing just that.

Bashing heather on Black Hill in glorious conditions last year. (c) ScottishHillRunners

Short version: well I won the race (just) with the second fastest time ever but almost 2 minutes behind Andy’s record.

Long version: unlike the Two Breweries I started hard. Within five minutes of the start I was up in the clouds and that continued for the next two hours – only a couple of times did we drop below the cloud line and be able to see more than 50m. This made the course a bit trickier and without significant local knowledge it would have been easy to go wrong – it seems several runners missed out some hills, hopefully accidentally! There was an unusual E/NE wind blowing down the course which was an assistance in the first half and may have helped my rapid opening pace. I’d plotted a rough schedule to get me inside the record and I reckoned I needed to pass the ‘half way’ checkpoint at the Drove Road in 77-78minutes. I got there in 74!

			Target	Actual	Even
1	Start
2	Caerketton	Hill	9.16	8.57	9.51
3	Allermuir	Hill	6.18	5.40	6.31
4	Castlelaw	Hill	7.30	7.10	7.43
5	Footbridge		9.36	8.35	9.36
6	Turnhouse	Hill	14.32	14.13	15.18
7	Carnethy	Hill	8.54	8.06	9.16
8	Scald	Law	9.30	9.06	9.52
9	South	Black	3.06	2.55	3.10
10	East	Kip	4.60	5.09	5.09
11	West	Kip	2.58	3.15	3.05
12	Drove	Road	1.48	1.42	1.48
13	Hare	Hill	9.48	9.06	9.57
14	Black	Hill	11.24	15.11	11.50
15	Bell's	Hill	12.30	14.12	12.52
16	Maiden’s	Cleugh	1.48	1.49	1.48
17	Harbour	Hill	3.41	3.33	3.53
18	Capelaw	Hill	7.08	7.54	7.22
19	Allermuir	Hill	6.18	7.59	6.31
20	Caerketton	Hill	5.22	6.01	5.29
21	Finish		3.36	4.01	3.36

(Formatting seems to be a bit out of line: red = slower than target pace (2:20), green = quicker than even pace.)

I met Oleg on the Drove Road and said “This could get messy”, meaning that either my legs were going to fall off or I was going to keep it up and obliterate the record. Unfortunately the former came to pass! I ran Hare Hill with Oleg and then followed him down towards the Green Cleugh but got a bit lost here and had to double back through some bracken – probably 20s lost. He turned back towards his bike down at the Howe and left me to battle on up Black Hill with the comforting advice of “Fight on the next two hills then you’re on the home straight!”. Unfortunately at this point someone stole my quads and replaced them with lumps of wood. It wasn’t obvious I was going slower but the hill seemed to take a long time – not helped by the 10m visibility – and by the top I had lost all the advantage I had on the Drove Road. After that though the climb up Bell’s Hill definitely felt slow though and I had to stop and walk for the first time on the steepest bit. I could still run quickly on the descents but on the climbs my legs, and quads in particular, were very fatigued and couldn’t pick the pace up at all.

Struggling out of the mist up Capelaw. All form gone. (c) ScottishHillRunners 

I was pretty sure the record was beyond me but I fought on regardless. Capelaw seemed to have got steeper than any time I’ve run up it before but I told myself “I’ve never needed to walk up it in training so I didn’t need to walk up it in the race”. That logic didn’t work on Allermuir though and I was reduced to power walking past Oleg, Morag and Pete and Jase, Janine and little Matthew (top support though!). From there it really was the home straight and I still had half an eye on the watch... still under 2:20 approaching the final summit... where is the summit? There’s a cairn here somewhere... finally, there it is. 2:20:40, can I drop to the bottom in 2 minutes? Let’s try!

Sadly (and unsurprisingly) I failed. Kitch’s time passed just as I reached the top of the ski slope. I felt OK running down the last grassy slope but spectators later told me I was clearly pretty exhausted. I collapsed in a heap until Al Anthony appeared less than a minute and a half down, well inside his previous PB. I hadn’t seen him since half way up the first hill, so he’d obviously run a far more evenly paced race than me!

In the end it was pretty satisfying to get so close to the record. Conditions were far from perfect and there were a couple of navigational wobbles. Andy ran a 2:24 before he ran 2:22 so I’ll definitely be back for another crack at it in the future. The great man himself finished not long after me, two seconds outside his target of 2:45. He really is the beast of the Pentlands.