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Chedworth Roman Trail 10 mile - Edward Collier - March 2010

My love/hate affair with off-road running continues, with my participation in Sunday's Chedworth Roman Trail 10. My readership (do I have a reader-ship? Possibly a reader-yacht, or maybe a reader-rowing-boat) must be somewhat confused because on the one hand I claim to dislike anything but road running, while on the other I have run two off-road races in as many months, with another (The Forest of Dean Half) to come. What can I say? I filled in the race applications while sober and not under the care of a psychiatrist I don't understand it either.

The Chedworth Roman Trail 10 does have a number of things going for it. First, it has some road sections. They're not long, but they're mighty welcome. In fact, the road sections might explain why I keep entering this race, year after year, as they mostly occur at the beginning of the race and at the end - the bits in the middle I somehow manage mainly to forget. It's also slightly shorter than some - the Cleevewold, for example, which is about forty-five miles of hideous hills and only a scant quarter of a mile of road, or the Dursley Dozen which is just twelve miles too long.

This year the race was run in near-perfect conditions - a little chilly at the start, but lovely and warm at the end. The route follows the road (yay!) from Chedworth Village Hall for about quarter of a mile before turning down a farm road, and then the mud begins. For the next four or five miles the conditions alternated between very slippery mud, slippery gravel tracks, and slippery grass tracks. And puddles. At just after halfway you ford the river (in earlier incarnations of the race, the river was crossed three times), which comes to mid-thigh on me. The runner in front of me fell over, to general hilarity from the assembled sadists. At this point you are as low as the race gets. Not low in terms of morale, low in terms of height about sea level. Then the climbing begins. Round a couple of fields and then onto a road (yay again!) for the best part of a mile towards the Roman Villa. Then the real climbing begins, as the path snakes through the woods back onto the higher ground. Eventually you come out on the edge of the airfield, and you think you're home and dry, since you can almost see the finish. Sadly you're wrong, because you have another vicious descent and ascent through woods before the mud returns in earnest. Mud and farmyard, I noticed - a pungent and rather noxious mixture, which reminds me unpleasantly of the final mile in the Cleevewold, where conditions also get rather agricultural.

The final stretch, more or less downhill and on road, should have been to my liking. For some reason, which I can only put down to my prior exertions, my legs felt like they had turned into spears of over-cooked broccoli, my lungs were full of battery acid and the fact that I was making any forward progress at all was a source of amazement to me.

Through gritted teeth I would recommend this race - it has slightly increased the love on my love/hate balance for off-road running. Luckily I've chosen to do the Forest Of Dean Half this year instead of the Cleevewold, because if I had chosen the latter I would be well on my way back to the Dark Side. I did read somewhere that the route of the Forest of Dean Half has been altered, to the extent that some eternal optimist is hailing it as a PB course. The only way I could imagine the Forest Of Dean Half being a PB course would be a) if it was your first half marathon, or b) they relocated to the Forest of Norfolk, or c) they installed travellators (those nifty moving walkways that get you to the departure gates at Heathrow). Doubtless I'll be back to tell you which of these turns out to be correct.