Irchester Country Park is only down the road from where I live so brought along my wife and kids for some cheerleading support. Once we arrived at the car park, marshals were selling tickets to make things easier and save long queues at the pay and display machines. The park itself has good facilities. A cafe and toilets which were open to runners and clean so no issues or queues there. About fifteen minutes before start time, they started summoning everyone to the start line, a short walk away from the cafe up a hill. Quick race briefing to the amassed crowd at the start line doing an assortment of stretches and then we were off! I got a bit carried away and tried to keep up with the lead pack, forgetting that there were 5, 10km and some serious looking 15km runners around me. That, and the downhill start meant that I had to slow down a fair bit once I realised I was running at a speed I couldn’t maintain for the course but soon settled into a steady pace of around 8 min miles. The 5km multi-lap format meant that spectators got plenty of opportunities to see the runners. That combined with the great weather meant my support crew got to cheer me on on each lap and then go back to the nearby playground. A nice touch for keeping our young kids occupied and was a good morale boost on every lap. While the sun came out for the race, we’d had quite a bit of rain in the run up to the weekend so the course was muddy in places, this got churned up further as we completed the laps over it but all added to the fun. The course has one main hill, but another sneaky incline before the end of each lap (up the hill past the start line, around a tree at the top and then back down) which caught me out every time but was a nice opportunity to exchange words of encouragement with fellow runners. Not far after this the course split with a marshal pointing runners to either turn right to the finish or stay left to continue another lap depending on whether their race bib said 5, 10 or 15km. I had hoped to come in under 1:30, with a nice to have goal of 1:15 (still quite new to trail running so have been quite conservative with my goals), so was chuffed to come in at 1:07 - 15th place overall (13th place male). The distance seems to have come up a little shorter than the advertised 15km on my GPS and I heard quite a few people saying the same afterwards but overall a very well organised race in a lovely trail location. I’ll try and make both rounds next year and see if I can improve my time.
Thanks for the great review Richard, hope to see you next year - Go Beyond Sport