The Original Mountain Marathon
Into the Mists of Mid-Wales
Rob Howard / 24.10.2009
The 2009 OMM is underway and competitors were setting off throughout Saturday morning in the forecast wet and misty weather.Parking and registration was efficiently handled, as always, at the Royal Welsh Agricultural Showground in Builth Wells with competitors arriving from all over the country (and further afield) throughout Friday afternoon right up to midnight, and again on Saturday morning. There was a large room available for the registration formalities (signing on the dotted line, leaving car keys, collecting Sportident dibbers etc), for the busy race shop, and for the big canteen was busy non-stop.
Some of the competitors were new to this procedure and needed a guiding hand and a word of advice, others were old hands. One such was Helene Whitaker who is racing the Long Score and commented, "I realised this is the 25th anniversary of my first mountain marathon. Really I should know better! Someone shoud sell a T-shirt saying, 'Remind me I said Never Again!"
Inside Event organiser Jen Longbottom was on hand to sort out any problems and fielded a few requests for the weather forecast. Most knew the forecast for Saturday was bad, but when the front would arrive and to what degree, no one seemed to know. "The forecast is changing by the hour," Longbottom said. "There are some gales and heavy rain forecast, so we'll have a meeting tonight to decide if we need to use bad-weather courses." In the event there was no need to do so.
Hidden away in the middle of the main building event planner Roger Smith was busy briefing the volunteer race marshals and had had a busy time through the day re-routing a large section of the Elite and A class day one courses. To his dismay a late access issue had arisen and the land owner was intractable so there was no option but to reroute ... and remark all the overprinted and laminated maps produced by Stirling Surveys. While I was with him he met a Dutch volunteer marshal called Jerome, who had flown to help when he was unable to compete and mused he might be the first overseas marshal to work on the race.
When I asked him about the course he said, "It isn't a very mountainous area by contrast to some we have visited, but the terrain more than makes up for the lack of height. Particularly in the central part of the map there areas of swamp, bog and tussock where you can easily lose the will to live! Having said that it is a fabulous area and we've had some fantastic days here this past year, often not seeing a soul all day. If the weather is misty as forecast we might have a few lost people out there though ... if you can't navigate from contours you won't get far!"See All Event Posts
