The sixth year of this popular ultra distance event put on by the very friendly lot at Long Eaton Running Club. You may remember quite a few of us did it last year and for most our first ultra distance, can you believe this is my third ultra Marathon of this year?
Just myself and Katie Hateley running today for Striders, this being Katie’s first 30+miler after doing 27.5 miles at Baslow two weeks ago, if it goes wrong it’s my fault for talking her into this! The race starts at 9:00am and at a nice social pace we quickly get onto the canal towpath towards Shardlow and before we know it we hit our first checkpoint at 10.5 miles where the rain absolutely hammers it down.
The rain continues as we pass Shelton and head into Derby, although it clears up its still ominous and showery throughout the day. The cycle route we are on through Derby isn’t the most interesting but I tend to find that working through it is actually a part which helps an ultra runners mind; it’s not too bad as we meet a great guy called Andy from Draycott who ran with us the entire race.
The second checkpoint is at 18 miles, very nice to see our Club Chairman Rich Gray out supporting us here, checkpoint 3 and the race finish. I really felt like I’d ran 3 miles which Rich said “Who’d have thought training makes you better?”, many a true word!
Next couple of miles along the trail path are followed by more serious offroad stuff as we hit Morley; this is very much the ‘second half’ of the race with far more offroad and undulation. Still happily we make it to the 3rd checkpoint at 26 miles and my only worries are being a little dry throated, although the team has spread out on occasion we pretty much ran together.
The hilliest part of the root is the long pull over Stanton on the Wolds before a long downhill over the golf course, a few fields and for me the hardest part of the race the seemingly never-ending half mile of tarmac along Longmoor Lane to the race finish.
The Nomad is pretty brilliantly put on by LERC, very friendly team, the signage was a lot better this year on what is a cracking route through South Derbyshire, how many races give you a pint of hand pulled beer and a large filled jacket potato on finishing amongst many other goodies? I cannot rate it high enough and so glad we have now had six Striders do this event who can testify how worthy it is.
The Nomad is a great step up for those looking at moving up from Marathon distance,
I guess I have to mention our lovely Katie Hateley who came 1st lady in her first 30+ miler! Not only did she run a great race (bit of a natural here if I’m honest), but she got a superb lot of prizes for doing so!
Katie is running this as part of her ‘Gambia Trilogy’, with Beacon24 next week and Snowdonia Trail Marathon at the end of next month. Katie is raising funds for Humanity first medical to raise money for things like defibrillators for disaster relief in countries less fortunate than our own. If you would like to sponsor this remarkable lady the link is below:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Katie-Hateley4
[Rob]