FROM LONDON WITH LOVE
ENGLISH NATIONAL CROSS COUNTRY CHAMPIONSHIPS
As a wooly-backed Northern lad from farming stock, it's nice to go and take in the capital city from time to time and get a taste of how the other half live. I would struggle to live there I think, but nowt wrong with a trip out and especially when it's the triennial turn of Parliament Hill to host the English National Cross Country Champs. I remember my last visit to this occasion back in 2015 with Blackburn Harriers. I loved it and wondered why the hell I had never done it before. As such, until my legs can no longer get me around in a half respectable time, it's a must-do when it's in London. I'm already mentally checked in for 2021!
Back to the present though and this time around with Ribble Valley Harriers. Most of us travelled down together in some style with an eight seater Merc put on by our chauffeur Andy Heys. Those machines just cruise at 70mph - it felt like 50. There was plenty enough room and comfort to avoid scrunching up our athletically tuned bodies and thus getting away with making the long journey on the early morning of race day. Our hotel was ideally situated near Hampstead Heath where the action was at and once parked up, it was a short walk to the scene of one of the greatest amateur spectacles the sport has to offer. With a huge pre-entry of almost 10,000 athletes across the board of the ten races on show, it's renaissance of popularity in recent times is a real positive for the club running scene and the sport in general. The Nationals is not about running to raise money for charities - not that I believe such a thing should be outlawed, far from it, before some crazed Neo-Liberal Conservative twists my sentiments here and takes it to The Daily Mail - but nor is it about jogging around with smiley faces and thumbs up, or running for the basic sake of activity itself. There are plenty of opportunities on the race calendar to tick those types of boxes - but this race is most definitely not it. The Nationals is all about pure racing, the competition, getting stuck in and running the very best you can on the day. Everybody else is doing the same thing. Blackburn stalwart Matt Nuttall doesn't say a great deal, but it's normally profound when he does. I believe Matt to be spot on when hearing he remarked that in a normal race these days you might get only ten percent of the field racing really hard for positions, but at the Nationals it's the opposite way around with ninety percent - and when that's out of a field of over 2300 like this year's senior men's line-up, this makes for one hell of a race.
Such a swell of numbers conspired to create a few chaotic moments though early on in the race as the course bottlenecks quickly on the brow of Parliament Hill. If you didn't or couldn't sprint off hard enough to make the top hundred after that first hundred yards or so then congestion came your way. Things came to a bit of a standstill on two or three occasions where the course narrows early on, but that's how it is. Over a distance of 12K, there's plenty of time and opportunity to get some places back. For some higher end athletes, however - such as my shop boss Ben Fish who got stuck in that traffic - it's a bit frustrating because some serious ground was lost on his rivals. For the rest of us though, it's not ideal but I guess we were all in the same boat. I wouldn't like to see the start of the course change as the bottleneck is an infamous feature of the Parliament Hill experience. The day after the weekend before, Ben and I were putting the world to rights and pondered the best way around the problem for in three years time and in order to give the higher end athletes a little bit more priority, but without limiting overall participation. The conclusion was narrower pens and even single file pens for clubs less represented with the pens labelled by club names rather than number where each club can literally put their faster runners to the very front and be responsible to line the rest up in order of ability - thus a more staggered and less frenetic merge upon that opening slope perhaps?
Anyway, back to the race itself and I was feeling really quite comfortable after the first smaller lap. Too comfortable perhaps? I began to crank the pace up a little bit on the next larger lap and it's incredible how even when over half way around there are still so many runners around to overtake and still a good few to be overtaken by - I doubt my position stayed the same for more than ten seconds at a time throughout the whole duration of my race. It's a proper ding-dong all the way around. Once in to that final large lap and fully revised of the course, I started to dig in a bit more and do some serious serial overtaking. But even in massive fields like this one, there is always one face that becomes familiar and in my case it was a chap from Manchester club Chorlton Runners. I thought I'd got rid of him three or four times, but as much as I wound the speed up harder and harder on that final lap he kept popping up beside me again. With probably just less than a mile to go, I decided enough was enough and I had now shut out everybody else in the race and was eyeballs out to get away from the sight of that Chorlton vest for good. But no, half a mile to go and he came by again. As the descent through the woods begins and the finish is in sight, I passed him once more thinking I must have broke him by now. But no - yet again - as the 300 metre or so flat sprint to the finish began, he flew by once more so I hung on to his shadow, hoping I might find that little bit extra on him somewhere before the finishing line. He proved equal to my final offerings though and did me by a couple of seconds. On the plus side, chasing this guy as if my life depended on it must have bought me at least another dozen places in those closing stages. Perhaps I'd gone out too conservatively early on, but I was jiggered at the finish and enjoyed the contests out there. All that effort for 832nd! But I'd do it all again tomorrow, it was ace.
Last time here three years ago I was on the back end of a chest infection so couldn't really dig very deep at all. It was nice to come back to this iconic venue, reasonably fit this time and really feel like part of the battle.
It was a fantastic day for Ribble Valley Harriers all in all. Our ladies team - which is what it's all about - finished a fantastical fifth. An awesome achievement as Walshaw, Jackson, Powell-Smith and Glover finished between 39th and 68th from over 1100 runners to put a club with fewer than twenty members in to the national gaze. The old geezers didn't do too badly, machines Gaskell and Hall were about four minutes and 400 places ahead of myself. The fast improving and comparatively youthful Andy Heys, at 38, also ran a blinder just 80 seconds behind me. I fairly smacked that last lap out as well so I may have to watch my back for him this year.
Ribble Valley put out ten runners, including a full ladies team at the Nationals, despite being a club of so few members. With the exception of Blackburn Harriers, who fielded a strong turnout and gained an excellent 22nd in the men's team standings, no other club was in evidence flying the flag for Lancashire. It's been a familiar tale in recent times regardless of the championships' location and quite a saddening statistic. The Cross Country Nationals - and particularly at it's spiritual home on Parliament Hill - epitomise what the sport is all about. A huge turnout where everyone of all levels of ability get stuck in and race hard. As a spectacle to both watch and participate in, they are fantastic races. That poses the questions, where were all the other clubs from our area and why? Most definitely their loss - not just for the racing, but the crack.
A meal and a few too many beers in the evening, a physically disjointed but aesthetically pleasant four mile run around a sunny but bitter Hampstead Heath in the morning, before a late breakfast and then homeward bound. A cracking little weekend of running club indulgence.

Saturday 24th February 2018
ENGLISH NATIONAL CROSS COUNTRY CHAMPIONSHIPS
Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead Heath, London.
1st Senior Men's Race (12K) - Adam Hickey (Southend-on-Sea AC) 39:35
1st Senior Ladies Race (8K) - Phoebe Law (Kingston AC & Polytechnic Harriers) 28:33
My Stats - 52:25   832/2328