Rainow 5 2025

Rainow 5

Wilmslow:Ashley (27)Nic (44)Markus (67)

League 1:AshleyNicMarkus

League 2:Mike (72)Jarrod (74) Colin (108)

League 3:Richard (170)Ian (177)Nic (200)

League 4:Gareth (194)Holly (205)Kate (301)

League 5:Catriona (267)Ian (303)

Ladies:NicDi (120)Holly

When I saw Rainow on Jan’s list, I entered without a second thought, I’d run it a number of times over the past 30 years. However, refreshing my memory the day before, it suddenly looked daunting, I had not run it for, perhaps, 10 years, in which time I had massively declined. 7:30 start. How long will it take me? What time does it go dark? But noting that Peter Speake’s father, who is older than me, had completed the London marathon, as he has done every year, was I being a baby? And I found a safety net. If I were to get to White Nancy in last place, by myself with no tail-runner, I could turn round, retrace my steps and re-join the field for the final mile to the finish. No points, but survival.

White Nancy has a club history. A former runner, Paul Ayres, had to paint it as part of his community service following a ‘domestic’ at the time of his marriage split. Kate, then our best female runner, we lost, she moved to the Lakes.

Descending a steep valley we ground to a halt, a four-minute queue for a gate. Chance to chat to those around me and assess progress, half-a-dozen behind me. Satisfaction with 6 behind and 300 ahead might seem like lack of ambition but there’s more to life than winning. Retain this position down the valley and up to White Nancy, which I did, and, although I had only a third of the mileage under my belt, I could begin to smell success. A small success, I wasn’t going to beat any Wilmslow runners, but probably I was going to get to the finish and probably not as last in the race as a whole.

At the halfway mark, Kate running in the wrong direction. A medical emergency? No, lost her phone in a fall. Unsurprising, the surface was rough, rocky, unforgiving. Whilst the uphill was tough, the downhill was tricky.

One more steep hill, then a long uphill drag and finally tarmac again and a ‘sprint’ to the finish.

The aftermath was nostalgia, tea and cakes, a throwback to when race organisation was amateur before it became professional but this evening there had been nothing ‘amateur’, the marshalling was superb.