Race date: Sunday 5^th October 2020

This is the one race that needs no introduction, so there isn’t one!

In case anyone doesn’t know, the organisers did a good job of supporting runners anywhere in the world in completing the 26.2 miles (42.2 km) wherever they happened to be.  The rules allowed you to pick your own route so all(!) you needed to do was complete it within 24 hours, clutching a smartphone (or not)…

A fair number of our socially distanced club members covered the distance in a very wide variety of times, which are not really comparable with one another.  Altogether 42,978 (this number will probably change) people worldwide participated in the virtual event.  Interestingly, it looks like the female/male split was almost exactly 50/50.

You can find the full results here .

Just a note on my 13 hour result – the race arrangements allowed me to cover the distance whilst managing my very unhappy left knee.  So, I walked 4 sections with rest stops between to allow my knee to return to its normal size.  The first three sections were of about 12 km each with a short last section.  I actually walked for 8 hours and 19 minutes so about 5 hours were rest time.  Sadly, my knee prefers hills so I also did 664m of ascent over the distance.

Believe it or not, this all seems to have worked rather well and I may be able to run again at some point.  This experience is worth bearing in mind if you have an injury that would benefit from some distance work; virtual runs can provide a sort of helpful competitive environment….

Back to the Strider results (which are in alphabetical order as the times aren’t comparable):