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28 November, 2009

2002 Races
Butter Mountain League race - Report by Joe Lalor
Butter Mountain 23/5/2002 Fine between very heavy showers
The story of this race started for me on late Tuesday evening, with the wind and rain howling outside, when I got a call from Vivian O?Gorman from the race start. In an attempt to mark the following day?s race he had managed to get, with great difficulty, as far as Seahan but Corrig was impassable and the normal ascent ride was a river making it unusable for a race. After telling him to have some sense and get home we agreed to meet there at 3.30 next day and agree an alternate route up as far as Seahan.
Arriving at Stone Cross the next day we discovered the road south was closed to all traffic. On enquiry were told it would not be open to traffic until 8.00pm, too late for any race. What to do?--- Cancel? No. Meet the runners coming through Old Bawn Cross and redirect them to Kippure. No, Kippure would be too wet and we would do too much damage. Plan C: Brian Bell and myself had recently surveyed a route for the late summer Trail League in the area and we decided to use part of that (there are many more tracks in that forest that you have not seen yet). Ironically only for the bad weather there would have been no race last night. All our flags (much effort, not much heed paid to) would have been on the unreachable Corrig/Seahan route and the organising team would not have arrived until 6.30, too late to arrange an alternative race.
The race itself was a runners route with the hill men feeling hard done by. The route mainly on steep good quality forest tracks was at about 7.5km longer than was expected on the night. 77 souls started off at a cracking pace downhill toward the river and around an 800m loop before an unrelenting climb into the forest. Surprisingly the pace never let up. Eventually runners were turned off the main track onto a boggy rutted trail covered with brashings just to remind us we are not road runners. At the featureless end of this runners were turned and began the long down hill dash to the finish. However before this was reached the runners were expected to complete the 800m loop they did on the way up. I appreciate that running fast down hill at the end of a long race it is easy to go astray however may I make the points that the route up and down were the same and there were 7 flags around the missed bend. The nine wrong times could not stand but what to do? Void the whole race (could not do this every time some one goes wrong), disqualify them or impose a penalty. The decision taken was to impose a 5 minutes penalty on each runner who took the wrong route and in most case this placed them back in the correct position. However it is important to realise that the purpose was not to reinstate position rather penalise all by a fix amount for the same mistake although the faster runners would suffer more.
Paul Nolan kept his clean sheet with another fine win, vet Gerry Brady second to turn was caught by Eoin Keith and all three admitted to nearly loosing their dinner on the tracks of Ballinascorney. First lady was Joan Flanagan showing no signs of fatigue after her second place in the 19km Circuit of Glenmacnass at the weekend. No runner in the MJ category, it must be exam time, with Deirde Bell the winner of the FJs. Good to see Paul Mahon back after his travels and in spite of more shoulder problems feverously trying to organise a Wicklow Way Relay Team.