That Saturday was a cold day, about -4°C in the morning and not due to get above freezing until sometime in the afternoon. No wind or rain, but a lovely clear sky.
I parked at Chase Road Corner at a little after 9:15 then set of for the Tackeroo caravan site where I'd been told the start was. Coming up to Rifle Range Corner I could see marshals in high-vis vests managing hordes of people crossing the road from the caravan site and heading towards the Rifle Range car park. Assuming that was for the Hellrunner, I turned left for the car park. Halfway along the road I bumped into Matt and somebody whose name I didn't catch (sorry) who were just nipping back to the Tackeroo to get their kit from the car. They'd spotted that there were facilities for dumping kit at the start/finish line.
The Rifle Range car park was full of marquees and stalls and lots of runners milling around with spectators, organisers and the like. After a bit of wandering around, we all met up, the five runners plus Wayne and me who had come to help and/or laugh at misfortune.
Matt, Emily, Raad, Andy and Swnidc(s) before the start
As the 1030 start approached, I made my way to the other side of the start line. The runners would head downhill from the car park towards the Sherbrook valley. After a bit of a delay (it does take time to get ~1500 people ready to go, especially when there is a long line to drop off your kit bag) they set off at about 1040. It took two and a half minutes for everyone to cross the start line.
There wasn't a route posted. The runners at the front followed a quad bike, the rest followed the front. We spectators had no idea, but according to the photographers the route came back past the start/finish line fairly quickly. We could see them heading south up a hill into Parr's Warren so I positioned myself on the track that came out of there and waited. Sure enough they came that way, running on the re-frozen snow.
Not shown for sanity's sake: either of the two blokes in nothing but a mankini
Once they had all passed by, heading north to the trig point and then into Haywood Slade, I went that way myself (off the route) wondering where would be the best place to catch them next. I followed a bunch of other spectators and found myself at the old rifle butts in the woods. The route ran past there and I had already missed most of them as there were only a few stragglers passing. What kept me there was that the route was going to pass there a second time, but now directly along the length of the pool at the foot of the butts. The one with a layer of ice about an inch thick. They had broken a path through for the runners some hours earlier but it had refrozen. I took up position on the top of the butts and waited
The first few through were skidding on the ice before breaking through the thin layer and into cold water up to their stomachs. It was noted that they were far from the shortest competitors. They were "encouraged" by a man on the PA dressed as Satan. Soon he was acting as DJ, playing things like Deep Purple's Burn and Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire plus many more, highly appropriate tracks. By the time I saw Emily and Andy go through there was a wide-ish channel clear of ice but obviously still ice-cold. It was also clear there was an underwater obstacle tripping many of them up. Including Matt:
Taken as Matt surfaced
Once Matt was through I started back to the finish line by the direct route. I saw Matt again as we both passed the trig point, then just as I reached the finish line I saw him cross it. Alas I didn't have time to get the camera out.
I met up with everyone behind the finish line, everyone except Raad who was still out running somewhere on the course and Wayne who was looking for him. After a while we started wondering whereabouts Raad actually was. He hadn't finished and wasn't in the First Aid tent. Andy and Emily had to go off to relieve a babysitter, the rest of us waited.
We started to get concerned when nearly everyone else had gone and the various stalls started packing up, but then about an hour after Matt finished:
What's more, there were more in after him.
