The Mighty Deerstalker

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Mighty Deerstalker - The View From the Pack

Pyro / 04.03.2008

A Quick Recap

So, March came around and once more the Mighty Deerstalker was upon us. Having run* at last year’s event I was keen to get involved and try to better my previous time of 2 hours 39 minutes. Last year I ran the majority of the event alone, didn’t take enough food, nor a sufficiently bright headlamp, and was also dressed as a ‘Knight of the Round Table’ (Monty Python chapter). As a result, by the time I stumbled over the finish line I was bewildered, completely spent and looking rather stupid. This year, I decided, I would try and remedy these faults.

Come race day, I arrived at the event village to the normal scenes: A crush of racers milling around, registering, wolfing down Wilf’s chilli or risotto in a vain carbo-loading attempt, or just having a cuppa. Unfortunately, due to the intermittent rain, all of this was happening in the marquee as no one wanted to brave the drizzle too early.

The hounds of the Deerstalker 5km race were unleashed shortly afterwards, and we watched a bunch of baying tweed-clad lunatics scale the now expected haybale wall and dash off for the jog to their inevitable conclusion of mud, water and hills. When their leader returned, around an hour later, it once again became obvious that this still wasn’t a normal trail run, and the course hadn’t been made any easier. Oh joy ...

(*I say ‘run’, it was more of a stagger. To use the word ‘race’ would imply that I actually competed, as opposed to just ‘tried to get round the course in one piece’.)

Once More Unto the Bunch ...

Come 5pm, the huge number of entrants for the 10km-ish Mighty Deerstalker lined up to face their fears, clad in everything from racing-snake lycra to fun-runner tweeds (and one Red Indian, strangely).

I joined the throng somewhere near the back, along with my teammate for the night, my long-suffering older sister Elise. The battle cry rang out amongst the crowds: Not a call to arms, but a call for the owner of the car parked across part of the early race route to come and move it. In fairly short order, the culprit was found and the carnage commenced.

We set off at a steady pace, up and over the haybale wall, which was nicely disintegrating by the time we reached it, down the drive and out onto the now closed section of road. Amid all the excitement it was hard to settle into a rhythm, but the short tarmac section (and the accompanying shortness of breath) helped me come back to my normal race pace (i.e, slow). As we diverted off the road down to ‘The Pond’, we made up a couple of places by cutting to either side of the main queue, a choice I almost instantly regretted. See All Event Posts