Lord of the Runs

According to Wikipedia, Bilbo Baggins, at the start of Lord of the Rings, travels to Rivendell and visits the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain before returning to retire at Rivendell and write books. One assumes that one day he would catch up with Frodo, after the latter’s adventures across three whole books, and catch up on what has been going …

Midsummer Madness

Midsummer always seems to come a bit earlier than expected. It seems like the summer only started a couple of weeks ago and yet last Wednesday, 21st June, was the Summer Solstice 10k in St Albans. Given that (hopefully) summer should last until somewhere around early – mid September, it isn’t really midsummer at all. More like early summer Wednesday, …

Hospital Harriers

The weekend of 10th and 11th June was hot. It was extremely hot in fact. So you would think that any kind of running would be tough. It was. In fact, Parkruns, at 9:00AM on Saturday felt very difficult indeed. One wonders why so many Harriers volunteered to run 13.1 miles in the searing heat in the St Albans Half …

Pigs Fly before Bandits Relent

The GVH annual summer handicap series got underway belatedly on Thursday May 25th. The scheduled April race was cancelled because part of the route was flooded and the decision was taken not to reschedule that race so the handicap series has been reduced to only 4 rounds, making each round all the more important. As usual there was a degree …

Baselining

It was a quiet weekend of racing for GVH with no marathons and no ultra marathons. Only a handful of people were in racing action on Sunday but there was a large turnout at Cassiobury Parkrun on Saturday for the 5k baseline run. Through the summer the focus for the club shifts to a training regime to improve speed on …

Regal Performance From Ultra-Harriers

The Coronation weekend will be remembered for the coronation, millions of hangovers and a group of Gade Valley Harriers who sat through Saturday’s show without touching any drinks as they kept their coronation powder dry for the Chiltern Ultra 50k trail race on Sunday May 7th. The addition of the extra bank holiday certainly proved useful for some as they …

Results Fairy Back in Action

With the Spring marathon season concluded most of the Harriers who were racing returned to the more mundane pursuits of the club league at the Pednor 5 (mile) race on the Bank Holiday Monday. Three members took on the half marathon in Milton Keynes and clearly nobody told ultra specialist Chris Dowling that the marathon season was over as he …

Marathon Season Ends on a High

On Saturday 22nd April the GVH Parkrun tour paid a visit to Buckingham Parkrun. With several Harriers otherwise engaged over the weekend there was still a healthy turnout of 8 athletes at Buckingham. Jon Roberts showed his enduring class, finishing 1st for the Harriers, 4th overall and 1st in his age category, in 18:30 while Helen Cook was the first …

Marathons and more Fairy Mishaps

The Easter weekend was a long one and clearly too long for every result to be reported correctly. Somehow rumours of a 5k race in Beaconsfield on Easter Monday had surfaced earlier in the weekend but then by the time of writing, nobody could remember exactly who had mentioned a 5k race and where it was. To cap it all, …

Easter Bunny Kidnaps Magic Results Fairy

Angeline’s Magic Results Fairy has been failing in its duties recently. After she missed Jon Roberts’ V50 5k record on 26th March it transpired that she was also AWOL on 2nd April and failed to report Merlin Allan’s run at the Kew Half Marathon. Initially suspicions were raised that she was in Wales, watching the marathon, but then it was …