One of the club’s goals for 2023/24 was to enter a team in a relay, something the club did, historically, on a regular basis. With our numbers we felt that the South Downs relay was a little ambitious so we decided to start locally with the Clarendon Marathon.
The Clarendon has been going for 26 years and is always well organised with a variety of distances, other than the relay there are options of a full marathon, a half or a five mile race. I’d ran the course before but had perhaps forgotten how tough some of the hills were – I was soon reminded.
Three other Wessex runners (Chris, Jay and Peter) volunteered to join me and some planning was put in place. Jay, as the youthful runner, kindly agreed to run the longest and hilliest leg of the relay (Leg C – Broughton to Farley Mount). Getting runners to and from the relay points was the trickiest part but help was gratefully received from Derek, Mike, Mrs Dougan and Mrs Ramm – without their help the event would have been a non-starter.
I set off from Winchester, taking the provided bus from the nearby Park & Ride, to the start in Salisbury. Race numbers had been collected the day before but I had to pop into race HQ to collect the relay baton. When I arrived there, just before 10:00, it was fairly quiet with a number of runners and relay team already having set off. There were two ‘mass’ starts at 09:30 and 10:30. The rain had held off, it was pretty cool and almost perfect running weather.
I ran the first leg (A) from Laverstock to Winterslow, it wasn’t too muddy and I may have set off a little too fast, there were a couple of fierce hills at Kms four and nine which slowed me down but eventually passed the baton on to Peter for leg B. He had ran a pretty good Winchester half marathon recently so was obviously hill fit and quickly made it to Broughton to handover to Jay. He had been warming up, raring to go and identifying which runners to overtake. Leg C was the toughest but Jay made short work of it, handing over to Chris at Farley Mount to run leg D to the finish at Kings’ School.
The Wessex team were finished in a fairly respectable 3:46:05, placing us 20th out of 87 teams.
David Howells took part in the half finishing in 2:23:35, an excellent outing for all Wessex runners taking part.
A good day was had by all and I would definitely recommend entering next year. It’s great to support a local event with the money raised being distributed across a number of charities. Perhaps two relay teams next year??
Wessex Road Runners 