• Prize giving. The first 3 mixed teams.

  • Richard 'resting' at the finish

  • The last control!

  • Day 2: Following Richard still

  • Cous cous... yum!

  • Building balloon beds at the mid-camp

  • Following Richard... mostly what I did for the whole weekend :-)

  • Day 1. The start

Rab Mountain Marathon 2012

This year the Rab Mountain Marathon started from Wooler in Northumberland. This event is ‘score’ format, meaning that you have 6 hours on day 1 and 5 hours on day 2 to locate as many controls as possible. The controls are worth varying numbers of points, and the largest point count wins, so tactics and planning are important.

Saturday dawned bright and clear and in no time we were at the start waiting to go.

Day 1. The start

An hour into the event, things were not going as planned. Poor mapping in one particular area, meant we had to take a longer route than expected, which resulted in us losing around 10 minutes, and then I got trapped in a (not very vicious) animal trap, which was fairly amusing. The next two hours were a bit of a slog; I was pretty knackered and just couldn’t get moving. After about 3 hours, I started to warm-up and moving across the terrain became a bit easier, but by this time we were choosing which of our planned controls to miss out, which was a bit frustrating.

Following Richard… mostly what I did for the whole weekend 🙂

We made it to the mid-camp 10 minutes early and with 245 points. We were in 30th place and 6th mixed team overall (including the vets) and 3rd mixed team (taking into account just the youngsters). Not the greatest day out.

Building balloon beds at the mid-camp
Cous cous… yum!

The camp was lovely, despite the rather dubious drinking water source and we had a nice evening… that was until we went to sleep…. it was rather cold and we slept fitfully. I’d forgotten that the Rab MM was two weeks later than usual this year and our lightweight sleeping bags were not quite warm enough. In the morning we woke to frost and frozen socks that were stiff as cardboard!

We got going quickly if only to get warm!

After the first hill, we warmed up, and felt good and we flew around the first 4 controls in about 1hr 10. We then headed back through the same valley that we camped in and started our journey to the finish, meandering across the hills to collect as many points as possible. Compared to day 1, we ran lots more and passed lots of people, which was satisfying. We also had to add on more controls to our planned route as we were going faster than expected :-).

Day 2: Following Richard still
The last control!

We arrived at the finish about 15 minutes early, where Richard collapsed for a short time before we walked back to the event centre.

Richard ‘resting’ at the finish

We scored a total of 255 points on day 2, which boosted our placings somewhat! We haven’t seen the final results yet, but whilst we were beaten by a couple of mixed vet teams, we came first out of the mixed teams! 🙂 Even better, we won some fantastic prizes, so thanks Rab!

Prize giving. The first 3 mixed teams.

The GPS track suggests we ran over 60 k, so not a bad weekend’s exercise… it’s a good job it’s cake day tomorrow at work!

18 thoughts on “Rab Mountain Marathon 2012”

      1. Once a month? However go you manage 😥

        We pick a theme each week. As long as the cake is on theme it doesn’t matter if it is homemade or not (unless the theme is homemade cake, which is a dam fine idea that will be used soon).

    1. Like you we can go for ingredients such as chocolate, strawberry, cream, icing sugar, there are lots of possibilities. We can also go by colour. This can be interpreted as referring to the cake or the packaging. Then there are more random themes of which one favorite of mine was ‘celebrity cakes’. This allowed a lot of interpretation when selecting the goodies (see what I mean). Next Friday the theme is ‘anything that hasn’t been brought in before’.

      The choice of theme is semi democratic with the discussion being lead by the chairman of the Friday fat b******d club who was appointed by Biff a few years ago so nobody is going to argue.

  1. :clap: :clap: Another great jobs guys!

    (Good to see the GPX facilities being put to such great use too! Ooh, and for future adventures, you may be interested to know that you can now have multiple markers at the exact same location – a feature I think Richard was keen to see…)

      1. I have looked at using the Google Earth plugin, but it keeps crashing – I think because of all the point data in a GPX track. Perhaps when Google produce more reliable code…

  2. I hardly know why you bother as you always win anyhow – you could just sit back and say “we know we could do that and so we don’t have to prove it”. And eat cake instead 😀

    1. It’s called an igotu. It’s perfect for mountain marathons as it has no display. The software is a bit clunky and you do need to remember to empty the data as it has a relatively small capacity, but it does the job.

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