Gravy Pud race review and the rest of #REDBED day 3

Today has been a day of dashing about all over the place.

A bit of work

The day started quite early with work. It didn’t need to be early for work’s sense, I just had a race to get to after it, so it meant getting up a little more promptly than I might have otherwise done for a 11am race time!

Here’s a little picture of my morning (and evening) client.

Guess the animal!

Guess the animal!

I’ll let you tell me the species (common name is fine)!

Gravy Pud Fell Race

Having done my visit it was off to collect a fellow runner and drive to a third runner’s house to get a lift over to Tintwistle.

I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to do the Stockport 10 road race this year, having done 5 years on the bounce. It’s a decent enough race (see last year’s review here) but really it was too much of a good thing.

I’d intended to get a few more off-road races in and when the Bill Fox Gravy Pud 5 Fell Race was mentioned, I couldn’t say no.

Bill Fox Gravy Pud route

Bill Fox Gravy Pud route

Fell Races tend to be a lot more informal (and a smaller field) than road races. It’s very much all about the run, rather than the bling-tastic goody bags of the road races. Which is another reason why they’re a lot cheaper to enter. Today’s race was £5.

The route started with a cobble path in the centre of the village before heading up a farm track towards Arnfield Farm. A steady little hill which dropped away again almost immediately. Then we climbed approximately 300ft in about half a mile onto the tops before winding our way down the other side. We took in a stream, a woodland, plenty of friendly marshals who gleefully told us we were doing well before returning to the village 5.5 miles later.

It was a really enjoyable route. Tougher than the average road 5 miler by several orders of magnitude. But the weather was decent and the views were fabulous.

No photos to my knowledge, but if I find any I’ll add them on! Results are here. I came 59th with a time of 48m22s.

Bell Ringing for War Veterans’ Christmas service

A drive home, shower and lunch and I was ready to go again.

Although my home church is only less than a mile from home, we do ring quite regularly at Stockport Parish Church; there’s no resident band so it’s made up of those from surrounding towers. We usually ring there once a month, however we do make additional visits for special services.

Pre-ringing faffage

Pre-ringing faffage

Today was the annual service for War Veterans in the Stockport area and we’d agreed to ring a piece called a Quarter Peal after their service. The ringing was scheduled to last about 50 minutes. Unfortunately the conductor mis-called the composition of the method we were ringing and it went on a little longer than planned (a couple of minutes!). The quality of the ringing was OK though and hopefully it was well received.

Not the bells we rang!

Not the bells we rang!

#REDBED?

In case you haven’t been following I’m raising money for the charity MIND via the @RunUp2Christmas campaign. As such I’m running and blogging every day during December 2017. Here‘s my explanation of it all.

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