Tough Weekend

Before diving into the always interesting results from last weekend, an apology. Sometimes I make things up, especially quotes, to make things more interesting (but I don’t make results up) and sometimes I try to make jokes. I do sometimes intend to poke fun at people but I never intend to offend and I certainly try to recognise everybody’s achievements. …

Ultra Busy Weekend

September 23rd / 24th was a busy weekend for Gade Valley Harriers with athletes taking part in distances from 5k up to 50k. Before that though, some unfinished business from last weekend as Anita Fenoughty, having graduated from the L2R program only last year, took on her 2nd triathlon at Woking on 17th September. Anita said, “I’m not as fit …

New Forest, New Record

Back on Thursday 7th September 35 Harriers gathered for the final round of the 2023 handicap series. As ever, the club extends its thanks to Helen Terry for organising the series and sorting the fact from the fiction and the downright lies in people’s handicap entreaties. The full results of the series will remain under wraps until the prize giving …

Festival Fun for Harriers

As the long summer holidays came to a close (at least for my children and my partner, my “summer holidays” lasted exactly 6 working days and ended a month ago) Gade Valley celebrated with the final race of the year long Club League at the Bedford Festival of Running on Saturday 2nd September, a couple of Harriers waited until Sunday …

Harriers on Holiday

There are fewer races during the holiday season. Probably because people go on holiday. And there are fewer people writing about races during the holiday season, because they go on holiday too. So my apologies go out to anybody who did actually race in the past couple of weeks while I was away on holiday. As long as it’s on …

GVH Learns to Run Again

On Wednesday 19th July 12 Gade Valley Harriers gathered at Waddesdon Manor near the village of Waddesdon, north of Aylesbury, for the July round of the Club League. The Waddesdon 5k race follows a fairly simple out and back (up and down) route. It starts in the big car park at the bottom of the hill, goes up steeply to …

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 …