Rab Mini Mountain Marathon – Dovedale
Two Striders Andrew Easom-Bentley and Simon Bottrill left behind a rain soaked Melton Mowbray and headed into Derbyshire for what was a glorious summers evening in beautiful surroundings. This was to be a really well organised event and no sooner had we arrived at the start (The Old Dog Pub in Thorpe) we collected our dibbers, were handed a map, formulated a quick plan and were on our way.
Racing as a pair we had a 2 hour time limit to find 15 locations marked on the map in and around Dovedale with points awarded for each location dependent upon difficulty. With little time to warm the legs up we immediately started to climb and arrived at our 1st location within minutes, this spurred us on and very soon after we had reached the 2nd. From there an ankle breaking decent brought us to the River Dove and we wasted far too much time trying to find our 3rd location.
We soon got back on track but the delay caused us to rethink our strategy opting to do the big ascents in order to gain more points. The warm evening air combined with the climbs made finding the next 5 locations tough going. We managed to complete our challenge in 2:04 having made it to 8 location and covering 8.4 miles (with just under 1700ft of ascent) coming in 44th place out 107 competitors. [Simon]