When things don’t go to plan sometimes interesting things happen and in this case it was that I found myself driving 3 hours to run a little hill race up in Aberdeenshire at the weekend…
Whilst John and Graham were enjoying through their Swiss Peaks adventure the other week I was out at the UTMR stage race, which after 2 stages was cancelled due to heavy rain and snow. Waiting for a bus to transfer us on to our accommodation I got chatting to Chris, who organises a hill race in Aberdeenshire that I’d never heard of called the Cairn William.
So on Saturday I made the journey to Monymusk to join in the fun with 49 others. The race route heads up 2 local hills over a distance of 11k and 400m ascent and at the pre-race briefing Chris promised a variety of terrain and he wasn’t wrong!
A section on road helped the field spread out, then followed some tracks, a climb through a section of forest then out onto the first hill which was a welcome relief for me! But then the descent, which was less welcome, through trackless heather where other runners bounded past me and onto a nice runnable MTB route up to the summit of Cairn William itself. Fortunately, I encountered no mountain bikers on my way up. Unfortunately, the knee-deep heather returned on the descent and I stumbled down to the overgrown forest below and back out onto the track and on to the finish.
My main achievement was not picking up a tick along the way as Chris had warned us that he had acquired 3 whilst out course-marking, but there were plenty of prizes for category winners including some rather tasty-looking local honey…. Alas, none for me though, so I might just have to return next year to try my luck again…
Chris Henty