Karrimor International Mountain Marathon

A Long Score to Settle

Mick Kenyon & Alan Billington / 28.10.2002

Never having done a KIMM, or for that matter a Mountain Marathon (or even a marathon) I was a little apprehensive before the journey from Halifax to Wooller to take part in the KIMM Long Score event. It looked very hard as it’s not uncommon for the Long Score winners to run further than the elite (i.e. more than 26 cross country miles a day). To make things worse the weather forecast was looking terrible.

First I had to meet up with Alan Billington an orienteerer and outdoor enthusiast from Nottingham, who was my teammate for the weekend. I’d contacted Alan after he left a message on the KIMM forum and this was the first time we’d actually met. The weather was wet and big traffic problems on the A1 didn’t set things up for an ideal start. However with fish and chips in our bellies, we pressed on regardless! We opted for sleeping in the car overnight rather than on the quagmire/car park in our tent.

By the morning the weather was looking a lot better, blue-ish skies, a gentle wind and cool temperatures. With a 10:08 start time we got our KIMM sacs loaded with mars bars, gels and jelly babies and hung around in the refreshment tent waiting for our start time. The advice was that the start was 20 mins away so at 09:45 we set off for the gentle walk to the line, however we shortly realised we were 2 mins from our start time…. and the start line not in sight. A 10 minute run then followed to see us starting somewhat late.

The Long Score event has the benefit that you can choose which checkpoints to visit (as in an ACE Race) – as opposed to the Class events where all checkpoints must be visited.

We roughly planned our route, deciding to concentrate on checkpoints South of the Cheviot, followed by those CP’s in the South West. The thinking was it was better to head for the two large 50+ controls, picking up as many smaller ones on route and afterwards. The planners of the course made it hard by:

• putting a small amount of 30+ controls in the northern area, however the Pennine Way connected the North with the South West relatively speedily
• placing two 30+ controls in the far west which proved too attractive to resist
• clustering the 50+ controls around the back of the woodland in the South West of the area, meaning a commitment to leave these until the latter half as they were on route to camp
• placing the 50+ controls over a large area of boggy, peaty tussocks, meaning a tough finish to the day.