Northern Ireland Mountain Running Association
www.nimra.org.uk

Best wishes to our competitors in the second round of the Br Championship series. The race is over Moel Elio, Llanberis, N Wales next Saturday and is the first medium championship race, with a distance of 8 miles with 3000 feet of climb. NIMRA competitors include Des Woods, Brian Ervine, Gary Bailey, Alwynne Shannon, Jim Patterson and Fiona Maxwell, with the latter defending her vet40 title and Jim attempting to take the vet60 one.

The next round of the junior championship is over the first part of the Hill & Dale Hen & Cock race, taking place Thursday, 15 May. The course will include the climb up Hen only and will start shortly after the Hill & Dale race. A full list of junior events was published on 23 February, with Donard Forest being the next one on 20 June. However if you are good enough there may be an alternative attraction that weekend ? watch this space!

Speaking of juniors, one of our female juniors has not been entirely unoccupied since Castlewellan.. After finishing fifth overall in that junior championship race, Aine McCann followed this up with a run in the London Mini Marathon, finishing 1st N. Ireland girl in her age group.

Aine then travelled to Edinburgh where she competed in the British Orienteering Championships and came home with two 1st places - the W16 individual championships and the junior mixed relay team. The following weekend she was back in Edinburgh, representing her school, Down High School in the World Schools Orienteering Championship. Aine showed the full quality of her running by winning the W16 select championship and posting the fastest run on the course!

At this event on 4^th May, held over Black Mountain on the Carlingford peninsula, Neil Carty finished in second place, just beaten by Colin Donnelly of Scotland, but ahead of Irish contenders. The overall result was a win for IMRA with 40 points, as against our total of 27. We were rather let down by our female competitors, or rather the absence of them. Points were awarded for places in each age group, with NIMRA winning the junior men (Dean Carolan, Tiernan Muldoon), senior men (Neil Carty, Andy Gregg, Steve Sweeney, Dale Matthews) and MV40 (Stephen Kennedy, Padraic Muldoon) categories, tying for MV50 (Willie John Brown, Desi O?Hagan) but without any points in the female, MV60 or MV70 categories.

Congratulations to occasional fell runner Karen Alexander of Sperrin on her splendid run in the Belfast Marathon, finishing in 2:55:58 in 36^th place overall, 3^rd lady and less than a minute behind the first local female Helena Crossan. Only three weeks earlier Karen finished the London Marathon in just over three hours. Karen obviously has much more potential at this distance and hopes to compete in the Longford Marathon on 24^th August and/or Dublin Marathon in October. As well as the pressure of trying to get under three hours, Karen had the added pressure of raising money for a charity. To date, through her three marathons, she has collected almost five thousand pounds for a Christian Aid Clean Water programme in Malawi.

Greg McClure, another London finisher from Abbey, also repeated his success with a sub three hour time in Belfast. BARF runner Brian Linton finished in 312nd place with 3:39:16 but then managed to complete the Annalong Horseshoe in 3:10 only 5 days later.

The Fellsman is one of the classic challenge events, taking in 61 miles and 11,000 feet of climb through the Yorkshire Dales, including two of the three Peaks. It was completed last weekend by Jim McCormick (North Belfast), Jonny Steede & Mark Alexander (both Ballymena). No times are available for the 2008 event yet, although the 2007 event was won in just over 11 hours by ultra endurance expert Mark Hartell, while mere mortals took up to 30 hours. For most competitors it involves some night navigation ? a quite new experience for many of us, especially when you have already been running and walking for 12 hours. Some of us will be back in Yorkshire again on 24 May for a similar but longer challenge event.

All three finished together in 17:53 hours, in 39th place out of 175 finishers, with 299 starters so a fair proportion of the field dropped out. The winner was Mark Hartell in 12:07 with David Waide three minutes behind.