Following the very hot Friday, the Skipton AC Marathon and Half Marathon runners in this year’s Wharfedale event, were relieved when the weather turned cooler for their run on Saturday 4 June. Apart from a reasonable headwind at times the weather was perfect and SAC achieved some excellent times and prizes from the largest field to run, with 86 in the full marathon and in 243 the half.
Claire Pearson should be very pleased with her “2nd lady” and “1st local lady” for the ½ marathon (1 hr 47 mins), especially bearing in mind a leg injury (I’d swap her injured legs for my uninjured ones any day!) and Barbara Robinson (4 hrs 37 mins) and Val Costin (4 hrs 59 mins) had fantastic runs in the full marathon, both winning 1st prize in their age categories!
Other runners in the ½ marathon were Glen Costin (1 hr 50 mins) Dave Gorman and Triss Kenny (both 2 hrs 4 mins), Brian Hugill (2 hrs 8 mins), James Kirkpatrick who had a great run doing it in a time of 2 hrs 26 mins with no training! Jan Smith gets the prize for being the last of the Skipton crew to finish in a leisurely 2 hrs 28 mins, but had conserved enough energy to go to a party that night!
It was also good to have some encouragement and refreshments on route from Richard Barrett who will hopefully be wining another prize in this event next year.
This is undoubtedly a tough race, but well worth the effort and well organised. Well done to all those that took part.
Jan Smith
