Report by Stef Brassington
The Carsington 7+ race was run on May 15th and after slightly bullying my other half, David, into entering with me, we joined the other 368 runners heading for a lap of the reservoir.
Thanks to some wonderful toddler germs and both of us having dug deep for some mid week races (I ran the Cromford BDL and David ran the Parks Life Fell Race), neither of us expected great times but we came away pleasantly surprised.
It was a mass start from the Visitors Centre Car Park and it was perfect running conditions, a slight breeze, overcast and not to warm… to begin with. About 25minutes in, the sun came out and it got a bit humid, luckily we had both opted for our WRC vests. I think the terrain took a lot of the runners from further afield a bit by surprise and thanks to my vest, plenty of runners realised I was local and I got asked “where’s the next hill?” “is it worse than that one?” “there can’t be any more hills?” a lot, (people didn’t really appreciate my answers until we hit Millfields Car Park and I promised it was all flat from there on).
David was pretty close to the front runners, coming in in 15th place, in a time of 50:43, while I was really happy to beat 2020’s time by over 2 minutes and come in 82nd (10th lady) in a time of 1:00:08 (yes those 8 seconds really annoyed me).
It was a really well marshalled, well organised and friendly event and everyone did a great job of supporting all the runners, I’ll definitely be heading back next year to try and drop those 8 seconds.