Scottish Hill Racing

My friend Bill Fisher and I are spending a ridiculous amount of time at the moment on our new project - Scottish Hill Racing. This project aims to capture data on all the main Scottish hill races, with fully indexed linkage between Runners, Clubs and Results.

I prefer to start at the Clubs page to search for people, and to check out how many runners are in each club.

If the club vest you are looking for doesn't exist yet, then look for the club by selecting "View: All Clubs", but you must be careful to wait for the whole page to load first.

You can then click on the Runners for Carnethy, for example, which takes you to the Runners page filtered on Carnethy runners. The runners are sorted so that the fastest runner appears first.

Not surprisingly, Stewart Whitlie appears at the top of the list.

You can then click on one of the Results Icons to see the race results, for example Ben Lomond 2006. The runner's name is highlighted.

You can then check out some of the nearby runners, for example Alasdair Anthony who finished 5th at Ben Lomond 2006.

Another feature is to click Runners on the main menu, to display a paginated list of all runners in the database, sorted with fastest runners first. "Avg %Time" is the average percentage time for each runner compared with the winner's time. So if you win all your races, you stay on 100%. This forms a league table of all the runners in the database so far.

By clicking the "Gender" header on the rightmost column you get the same list but sorted with fastest women first. Also from this page, you can sort on who has run the most races by clicking the "Races Run" sortable header.

You can also filter the Runners page by club, and check out who is the fastest runner in each club, and who has run the most races. I think the "Av %Time" for clubs could be useful for calculating start times for club handicap races.

The website also has some useful Race Details pages, for example Moffat Chase, which gives a route map plus an embedded Google map showing the venue location.

We are also working on a big map showing the venues for the main hill races in Scotland. You can get to the race details by clicking the pinpointer, then clicking the race name.

The database currently contains:

2100+ runners

180+ runner profile photos

235+ clubs

46+ club vests

41 sets of race results (for 2005 and 2006)

~5000 race result records

From the 41 race results in the database so far, only 21% of the 2109 runners have done 3 races or more. And 63% of runners have done only one race.

If the site crashes whilst doing a search, as it sometimes does, just click one of the main menu items again to re-load the page.

Jura Fell Race

27th May 2006
16.3 miles, 9,700ft
Results
Ian Holmes breezed to his 4th Jura victory with a huge 21-minute winning margin. Pretty blustery soggy conditions meant that only the first 6 runners finished inside 4 hours.

Photo credit: Barbara MacLeod

Scottish Islands Peaks Race

19th to 21st May 2006
60 miles, 13,800ft
Photos

A great weekend messing around in boats, and jogging up and down a few boggy hills in the mist and in the middle of the night. For the 2nd year in a row, Playing FTSE won overall, with Blue Chip finishing 4th.
Summary of Results and Runners:
1. Playing FTSE, Simon Stainer & Gary Thorpe, 37:37:08
2. Palletline, Jon Deegan & Steve Birkinshaw, 39:53:52
3. Memec, Phil & Jim Davies, 40:03:50
4. Blue Chip, Mike Robinson & Chris Upson, crew - Steven Garrett, Derek Cardiff, Graham Goudie, 42:50:24
5. Kinetic, Paul Fettes & Paul Currant, 43:22:48
6. Lark, First Youth Team, 44:00:17
7. Silly Automatic, Don Naylor & Louise Provan, ~44hrs
Only 7 teams of 51 entries had finished when we eventually decided to leave Troon marina.
Brief Runners Report:
We had a decent enough run on Mull (4:23) to leave the island in 3rd place behind Playing FTSE (Stainer / Thorpe) and Memec (Davies / Davies). On the sail to Jura, Palletline (Deegan / Birkinshaw) got ahead and landed about 10 minutes ahead of us. Memec were about 3 minutes behind us at this point. We were quickly overhauled by Phil & Jim Davies on Jura, and left the island in 4th place, after a not brilliant 4:21 run (very wet and soggy underfoot). We never saw another boat until we arrived at Arran 8hr25min later. Fairly exciting before the Mull of Kintyre. We lost our spinnaker and halyard in sea with much panic and cutting of ropes. We were very lucky the mast didn't break. Mike was repeatedly sick and ate nothing, so our Arran run was more a survival shuffle than a proper run (4:37). We lost loads of time, but not enough to be caught by Kinetic who finished 5th.
Routes:

Profiles:

Buttermere Sailbeck

14th May 2006
9.5 miles, 4650ft
Results  |  Photos
Stayed dry, more or less during the race, then tipped it down afterwards.
1. Simon Booth, 1:26:10
2. Nick Sharp, 1:27:33
3. Jim Davies, 1:29:45

Steffen's Bob Graham

13th May 2006
Photos
Steffen Gorgas started off this morning at 1am for an attempt at the Bob Graham Round, heading clockwise...
The attempt was curtailed 18 hours later at Wasdale after a valiant effort.

New Dungeon Ghyll Fell Race

11th May 2006
2.4 miles, 2086ft
Photos
Great weather for a low-key evening race. The route took a very steep line straight up and down Harrison Stickle, starting just below the New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel.
Summary of results:
1. Ian Holmes, 33:46
2. Rob Jebb, 33:50
3. Nick Sharp, 34:22
4. Danny Hope, 35:12
5. Colin Moses, 38:06
6. Dan Duxbury, 38:41
7. Chris Doyle, 38:43
8. Chris Upson, 41:07
9. Chris Robinson, 41:19
10. Neil Ashcroft, 41:42
??. Jane Reedy, 47:14 (1st lady)