Race the Train

A few months ago I’d been talking with a few people at the pub after a Wednesday night run with the running club, when Race the Train came up as a good idea for a weekend trip. This was the first I heard of it, but what I heard was interesting, so I ended up signing up along with Christie and a friend from the Serpies.

We committed to running the race before actually working through the logistics of lodging. Christie spent a decent amount of time researching B&Bs, hotels and other options within a reasonable drive of Tywyn, mid Wales, where the race is hosted. She found a few great places, but they were near larger towns, at least an hour drive from the race start.

This was about the time we realized “uh oh, there are some rural areas in Wales… this looks like it is a REALLY rural one.”

As a last-ditch effort to see if there were some secret lodging options that weren’t readily visible on the web, I sent a message to the Serpentine club email list asking for any suggestions. A runner responded saying he was planning to do the race as well, and that he has a vacation home in a town about 10 miles up the coast from Tywyn, where we could stay in the spare bedrooms for free!

Needless to say, we were quite excited by this option!

I managed to get out of work at about noon on Friday, went home to change, then we met at Kings Cross, picked up a car and pointed north up the M1. It was the better part of a six-hour drive, as it’s a 220 mile trip with very urban streets until you get outside the M25, then very rural narrow roads for the last 40 miles or so as you approach the Welsh coast. This was also my first time driving a stick shift right-hand-drive vehicle. The clutch took a bit of a beating as I got used to the feel of it and yes, the car might have stalled a few times (through no fault of my own, of course… whistle…) but overall it worked well!

We actually met Adrian, our host for the weekend, for the first time when we showed up at his place at 7pm or so on Friday. He was in the kitchen preparing a chicken, turkey and pasta dinner for the four of us… quite the reception and much more impressive than the “simple pasta dinner” he’d alluded to when we talked through the preceding week.

On race day, Christie did the 5-mile run, followed by Adrian, Desiree and me running the 14-mile route in the afternoon. It was overcast at race time, but had been raining rather heavily overnight. As the name of the race suggests, we runners were on cross-country style tracks as we raced a narrow-gauge train up and back down a hill.

The train finishes the course averaging about a 7’30” pace… something I could definitely do over that distance on flat surfaces, but which was well beyond my reach on the actual course. There were narrow sheep trails cut into the side of hills, with runners following each other in single file, and with footprints trailing off to the side where some of us had slipped in our attempts to navigate the mud.

There’s a great video of a prior year’s experience, from a spectator’s view, here.

Sunday, we drove up to Colwyn Castle along the northern coast of Wales, before driving back to London. Rather than returning to reality on Monday morning, though, I had another trip lined up: a week of camping and boating in Northern Ireland. I dropped off Christie and Desiree, unpacked my muddy stuff from the race, and threw my stuff for a week of camping into the car, drove to Chris’s flat in Greenwich and slept there before the beginning of the next trip.

My photos from the weekend are posted here.