Karrimor International Mountain Marathon

\'A\' KIMM Too Far

Chris McSweeny / 01.11.2002

Rob tells me I\'m his \"elite\" reporter (even though I was doing the ‘A’ class). Unfortunately I spent most of the weekend not feeling very elite, and struggling to hang on to my partner Sean Fishpool. I guess that\'s what you get for doing what was probably one event too many at the end of a long season, which I\'ve rounded off with Salomon 36, Lake District ACE Race, BARC, Polaris and KIMM - making a grand total of approximately 105 hours of racing in the last 2 months! The result is a bit of a hobble the day after, with aching ankles, knees and hips. Anyway enough of that - on with the report.

To borrow a footballing cliché, it was very much a game of two halves. Saturday was sunny, warm and pleasant, whilst Sunday treated us to the tail end of the gales, the worst of which had fortunately swept through during the night - or in the case of those of us with minimal lightweight camping kit, maybe not so fortunately.

Starting off on Saturday morning, we packed up our rucksacks with our minimalist kit. Most of mine was filled with bubblewrap, which Sean claims is a statement of intent, as you\'ve got to try and do well if you\'re skimping to that extent. On the walk / jog up to the start I seemed to be about the only person in shorts - another statement of intent - though Sean, and a few others did strip down to theirs at the start. A slightly more worrying observation was the number of people in trainers which looked little better than road running shoes - did they know how tough the going would be up there I wondered?

The biggest shock to the system after the start was the number of people following each other in a train. Unlike adventure racing, there are lots of people all doing the same course - with 90 teams set off at 2 each minute on our course, it felt pretty crowded out there. This was particularly the case later in the day, when several courses converged, and we had to pick our way past many slower teams on a tiny path running along the side of a hill. My humour wasn\'t improved when one team in front took both threads of the path just as I was preparing to overtake on whichever one they didn\'t use!

One of the horrors of the Cheviot Hills - where KIMM was based this year - was the tussocks, which made it all but impossible to run, even when going downhill. This resulted in us making for the forestry, where the rides and paths made for much faster going. Naturally the course planner also tended to include legs where we went down to the bottom of a valley, across a river, and in a way familiar to adventure racers everywhere, back up the other side. A scenario we knew would be repeated many times, with a promised 2000m of vertical on our course today!