COMMONWEALTH ULTRA DISTANCE AND MOUNTAIN RUNNING CHAMPIONSHIPS - AN ULTRA DISTANCE OVERVIEW

24th September 2009

The inaugural commonwealth championships at these two disciplines (24-Hour and 100k) brought out some top quality performances, not only from the Scottish athletes but also from all the competing home nations and the visiting commonwealth countries.

They were also held in a great spirit of friendship and respect for what all the athletes were achieving, which was greatly helped by the choice of venue.

Any country looking to host these Championships in the future will be hard pushed to find somewhere where all four races were able to start (and with the exception of the uphill only race) finish in the same park location.

MEN'S 24 HOUR...

From the start of the 24-Hour, the two Australians. Martin Freyer and Jo Blake, were to the fore. Freyer had come into the race with the best previous distance of all the competing athletes and on the back of a world best at 48 hours at Surgieres in France in June. It was these two who maintained their steady rhythm once the race had settled down and continued as the hours progressed with a regular 10-11km per hour ...every hour.

Behind them, Scotland's Stephen Mason, Wales' John Pares and England's Chris Carver came through the race to challenge for the bronze medal in the last few hours. They traded places at times, but a strong surge from Pares in the last few hours pushed him over the magical 150 mile barrier. Mason clinched fourth just a mile behind the distance he set at the Perth Ultra Festival last September.

For readers unfamiliar with 24-Hour performances; in GB terms, anything over 140 miles (225km) is respectable; over 150 miles (242km) is getting into world class; Freyer's distance of 159 miles (255km) is getting to a level like a sub 2.07 marathon, where you take a breath and say "ok...this is another level again." It would have placed him second in this year's world 24-Hour race in Italy in May.

WOMEN'S 24-HOUR...

In the first few hours there was little to separate the leading six or seven women. England's Sharon Gaytor and Vickky Skelton, Scotland's Pauline Walker and Lynne Kuz and Australian Susannah Harvey-Jamieson all traded places.

After the half way mark, Skelton and Gaytor held a clear lead over the others with Walker very much involved in the chase for bronze. While Skelton hit a bad patch around 16 hours, Gaytor maintained her pace to pull away, and used all her experience of being Britain's No.1 at 24 hours for the last 10 years. She pushed hard over the last few hours to achieve her long held goal of cracking the 140 mile barrier (140.735 miles/226km).

Walker hit a bad patch early in the morning which allowed Jamieson (Australia) to pull away and eventually clinch bronze, but a revived Walker then stormed around the last hour and a half to reach the benchmark 200km barrier with literally two minutes to spare. With seven female athletes reaching 200km, the depth of quality of the race was, like the men's race, exceptional.

MEN'S 100K...

The English men, on paper, came into the race with a very strong team... and boy did they deliver, finishing 1-2-3 and by trading places over the last 30km probably made this the best Ultra "race " of the Championships.

The course profile was a steady climb out of Keswick for the first 10-12km up to Thirlemere reservoir, below the stunning Helvellyn Ridge, with a very steep kilometre from 2-3k. Talk pre-race amongst competitors was of a real Championship course with slower times (like Championship marathons in the main), and whoever paced it well in the early stages would prevail later.

Carolyn Hunter Rowe, the English team manager and double world 100km champion, had suggested that after the first undulating 12km, there was actually 80km of good fairly flat running with seven 10km loops at the reservoir to be completed before the mainly downhill return to Keswick.

Talk of slow times was probably from runners playing their chances down a little, or not having done their homework. By 50k, when the race had settled down, England's Matt Lynas led the way from his compatriot Matt Giles. The best of the English runners on paper going into the race, Jezz Bragg, was well off the pace in sixth or seventh, having had to take two emergency pit stops in the Porta loos and not exactly looking his usual self assured self.

By 80km, at the end of Thirlemere lake and the journey back into Keswick, it was Giles who held a lead of over three minutes from the revived Bragg with Lynas a further minute behind. The England support crew at the feed station were even muttering that they thought Giles may not be caught now. Bragg though, the only one of the three English runners to have run a sub-seven hour 100km, and on two occasions running almost negative splits for the distance, had now regained his composure and fought through whatever mid-race crisis he had. It is not that Giles actually slowed down. Gradually, Bragg, after maintaining what was already a useful pace, managed to up it slightly in the last 10km to catch Giles at the 95km feed station and maintain that on the last smooth slightly downhill 5km to enter Fitz Park and claim the commonwealth title in 7.04.01 with Giles just over a minute behind (7.05.28) and, like third placed Matt Lynas (7.09.52), slicing several minutes off his PB. Further back the two Australians in third and fourth, Terence Bell and Tim Cochrane, led them to the silver medals, while Scotland's young Grant Jeans, a late call up to the team, totally justified his inclusion by storming to 7.24.05 in his first 100km race and leading Scotland to the bronze medals.

WOMEN'S 100K RACE...

It was left to a remarkable Australian to run possibly the best ultra performance of the weekend. As Jackie Gallacher, she had claimed a bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games Marathon in Manchester in 2002 (2.36.37) and had also achieved world class status in Triathlon.

Now as Jackie Fairweath the challenge of competing for her country again, at a Commonwealth Championships in a different discipline, had obviously captivated her. Leading from the start and running alone for the most part from 30km she looked pretty much in control for the whole race to record 7.41.23, a time that would have placed her second in the World 100k at Torhout in Belgium in June.

England's Emma Gooderham recorded the best time by a British athlete in 2009, agonisingly missing her PB by just over a minute in 8.04.49 and leading her country to gold team medals.

Scotland's Lucy Colquhoun, despite a summer interrupted by injury, claimed the bronze with 8.19.45 also leading her country to team silver ahead of Canada.

Talk of slow times had been proved wide of the mark.

As an overview of the Scottish team, they certainly showed that individually we have athletes with the talent and experience capable of competing with the best and collectively, earning team medals in both men's and women's races, they can all be proud of their achievements.  

As with any team event, some team members excelled themselves, but even athletes who by their own standards did not perform as well as they would have liked, all showed a strength of character and comeraderie to dig in and run for the team to help clinch those medals.  

Although the selection criteria for UK ultra teams in 2010 has not yet been confirmed, using 2009 criteria as a guide, both Stephen Mason (Dundee Hawkhill) in the men's 24-Hour and Lucy Colquhoun (Carnethy) in the women's 100km, achieved the individual standard, and Pauline Walker (Carnegie) ,achieved the team standard in the women's 24-Hour.

Overall, it was good to see runners from both disciplines respecting each other. Hill runners were fascinated to watch a 24-Hour event unfold before them, seemingly at all times of day and night, and also make efforts to get out on the 100km course and offer encouragement. On the Sunday for the up and down hill races, this was reciprocated with most of the ultra runners and their support crews  joining the spectators up on Latrigg to cheer, wave flags and ring bells and  marvel at how the mountain runners literally "leg it" up the hills and let "gravity take over" on the descents.

The sight of Kenyan's tackling the hills seriously in a Championship is maybe a foretaste of things to come, and the huge cheer for Wilson Chemweno as he received his medal seemed to indicate that his was a popular victory. Maybe if the Africans actually take 100km seriously the long standing world record of our own Don Ritchie (6.10.20 set in 1978) could even come under threat.