Race Date: Sunday 4th September 2022

Race Report by: Jamie Smith

Visiting family and taking in Nottingham Forest’s remarkable efforts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory provided the opportunity for me to take on the Wilne 10k in the green and gold. When mentioning this race and its location, even to my long-standing East Midlands nearest and dearest everyone had no clue where ‘Wilne’ was. It turns out its sandwiched between Nottingham and Derby and really close to Long Eaton as I lost count of the amount of times I spied their blue and white colours.

I arrived in good time, which is advisable if you do this race in the future as the route to the car park is closed for the run about 30 minutes before the start. The wet stuff that falls from the sky then decided to make a rare appearance to grease the roads and make for an incredibly humid run. Nonetheless I donned the green and gold and set off to find the start line and maybe find a fellow strider, however I thought this might be a rare thing given the amount of racing available at Rother Valley on this particular Sunday.

Turns out the start line was quite far away so I made an effort at a warm up in an attempt to get there in good time for the start. After completing the first mile I immediately regretted my decision to run the Gedling Country parkrun the previous day. If anyone hasn’t done that parkrun the undulating nature of it on an old colliery site plus my ability to get caught up in the moment of running it like a race, meant there was little left in the leg reserves.

The nature of the course being flat unfortunately didn’t help my cause as I felt like I was towing a caravan around. After begrudgingly admitting to myself I’d made a mistake I adjusted my pace and found a speed I could maintain and was happy to finish in sub 50 mins at 49:18. The course beyond its flat nature was a 2 lap loop that given the start and finish position meant the second loop was slightly shorter. Leg fatigue issues aside this was a good course to try and get your PB on and due to the time of year a good intro (along with the Askern 10k) to the road racing season.

After studying and searching the results I found 2 other striders in Jordan Moat and Terry Armstrong who both put in strong performances with times of 45:03 and 1:00:13 respectively. The first male in was Samuel Moakes of Sutton in Ashfield Harriers in 30:02 and the first female was Charlotte Taylor (unaffiliated) in 34:02.

Here are the results of the Striders who took part: