Four Trigs

Sunday 17th Feb saw Richard and Lesley at the Sidmouth 4 Trigs Challenge. This is a find your own way, almost totally off-road, hilly 18 miler, with nine checkpoints. Normally we wouldn’t have touched a find your own way run with the proverbial barge pole, but just after Christmas, Lin and Martin persuaded us to recce the course with them. Two more recce runs followed and we felt confident enough to enter and I’m really please we did. Once again the weather was perfect, no wind, clear blue skies with wall-to-wall sunshine. I won’t go into all the details of the run ‘cos I want to get something on the blog before Lin and Martin as once again they beat me. In short I followed my planned route without getting lost but slowed to a miserable pace after the fourth trig. Although I had stayed ahead of Lin & Martin until now, they soon went past me, although I did briefly catch then up again, mainly because I failed to stop and punch my number at the ninth check point. Martin warned that there would be repercussions if I beat them following this slight technical infringement. The last steep step climb brought me to a standstill on several occasions, but once we were over the top of the last hill, it felt quite good cruising down the hill into Sidmouth. No T-shirt or medal (thank God), but a huge pasty and slice of cake and tea or coffee. Many thanks to the race organiser, a real value for money friendly run with fantastic scenery.

Before the race started Lesley was bleating about almost everything that could go wrong, getting lost, falling over, failing to finish, too cold etc. She even took the race organiser’s phone number in case of trouble. However she once again finished in a faster than expected time and I only just managed to finish my pasty and leave the clubhouse to see her confidently crossing the line.