Tiger's Trail 2019


Race date: Wednesday, 1 May 2019
This was the second race in this year's Totley AC series. Like the first one, it started at Sheffield Tigers rugby club, and finished with a mile-long dead-straight on-road downhill sprint down Long Line. And like the first one, that was the bit that did me.
Tiger's Trail (formerly Tiger's Todger until "overtaken by time" in the words of the announcer) is a weekday race, which means doing it hungry but at least awake. I turned up, parked on the rugby pitch, discovered I hadn't brought any gloves, discovered it didn't matter because they weren't imposing kit requirements, and looked for people to chat with, which was easy enough as there were loads of Striders, among them one of my colleagues.
Finally we were lined up, and after a nice round of applause for a recently deceased Totley club member, we were off. The route starts with a kilometre or so of fast downhill, before turning left at Whirlow Brook for the start of about 4km of surprisingly hard climbing (about 200m) to Lady Canning's Plantation. Despite something weird pinging in my left shin just after we started climbing, I made a decent fist of the climb. A sharp left then leads into a stony track that descends about half of that. It's the best sort of downhill terrain, with plenty of ruts and loose stones, and enough gradient to absolutely pelt it. At the bottom, you turn left and basically on to the Tigger Tor route, across a bit of grass and onto Sheephill Road for a bit of a climb. It was here that my recurrent bad race strategy started to kick in, and I ran out of gas. I'll have to address that one day.
Long Line is long and a line. It runs dead straight for about a mile, on tarmac, downhill. It does my knees and legs when I'm tired, and loads of people pass me. Not to worry, I  was going OK so I wasn't too fussed. Finally, it was a right turn across a field and the climb (only about 10 feet) to the rugby pitch. This time I managed to run up it, rather than walk. Then it was just across the pitch to the end, and cheering in a couple of other Striders. This was another nice shortish trail race after the Wharncliffe Sider with Rosie last week, and I managed to persuade myself I'd done enough, by finishing 83rd in 44:32.8, to deserve fish and chips on the way home.
The winner was Totley's Steve Franklin, in 31:00.3. First female was Hatti Archer, of Hallamshire Harriers. 161 runners finished.
Full results: https://www.webscorer.com/racedetails?raceid=178366

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