Northern 12 stage road relays

Today's Northern 12 stage road relay was a really good event with nearly all of the top road racing clubs in the North of England taking part.
Ilkley Harriers have more only entered this race 3 times before & the average age of our runners was considerably older than the front running teams. We were slightly disappointed to finish in 29th place (out of 46 teams that finished the race), although our average pace of 5:47 minutes per mile for the whole race was just about as good as we could have hoped for. Our Ladies team did really well, finishing in 14th place out of27 teams.

As team captain, I was a bit pre-occupied with organisational issues, so I wasn't particularly stressed before the start about my own race. However, once I got going it seemed to be quite a brisk pace, fortunately I had other runners around me to race with. The course started & finished on a running track, then was on paths around a park, often quite muddy (not sure why it was called a 'road' relay, it was more like a trail race). I ran my 4.9k leg in 17:50 at an average pace of 3:38 min/km (5:51 min/mile), so I was quite happy with that, given the surface.

It was a good day out, with most of our team travelling together to Manchester by coach, then having a beer when we got back to Ilkley..... and it didn't rain.