Dulwich Midsummer Relays 2017

The Dulwich Midsummer Relay race takes place in Dulwich Park, London. It is hosted by Dulwich Runners and billed as an approx 1 mile relay. We pre-registered our team using an online form and paid the £12 entry fee on-the-night.

As a note on our team - two of us are with Dartford Harriers and one with Dartford Road Runners, so we used Dartford United as our team name for the evening.

dartford united / pre-race [photos: esther / 7t]

The race is a 3 x 1 lap of the main inner loop that runs through the park. Anyone that has visited Dulwich parkrun will be familiar with the route as it uses exactly the same path - the only difference being that you only have to run one lap rather than three.

The loop itself is around 80 metres longer than a mile, so if you run here don't get too disheartened if your time is a little slower than what you would expect over a perfect mile course.

By the way, the route is very simple to follow and there's no way of getting lost providing you stay on the loop and don't follow one of the exit spurs. Underfoot is 100% tarmac and it's flat - you might feel the slight sensation of a tiny upwards elevation change during the latter part of the lap, but that is all.

The start time was 7.30pm and after a team warm-up we were all ready to go. As far as organising our team running order was concerned, we stuck with our tried and tested formula of predicted slowest first through to predicted fastest last.

dartford united [photos: esther]

My recent 1 mile races [2017] had seen me run 5.57 at the Westminster Mile and 5.47 at the Swanley Relays, so I was hoping to continue the sub 6 minute streak. However that extra 80 or so metres made it impossible to achieve and I ended up with a 6.06 time for my leg.

There is, helpfully, a Strava segment set up on the loop which looks to be pretty spot-on a perfect mile, so by using that as a guide it looks like my 1 mile time would have been approx 5.44.

The official results were published the day after the event and our confirmed results were;

Richey: 6.46 (6.46)
Steven: 6.06 (12.52)
Adam: 5.36 (18.28)

Combined time: 18.28
Finishing position: 17th (out of 52)

I recorded the course with my Garmin and you can see the course data here: Dulwich Midsummer Relays 2017

It was a lovely evening for the race and we had a great time being hosted by the friendly folks from Dulwich Runners. We followed the race up with a visited to the Fox on the Hill wetherspoons pub for some well earned food and a drink. Good times.

Swanley Relays 2017

The Swanley Relay race (4 x 1 mile) is hosted by Swanley and District AC, usually on the first Wednesday of July, every year in Swanley Park (aka New Barn Park) in Swanley. I've run this race once before (2014) and subsequently, whilst injured, organised teams for another (2015) during my time at SLGR.

This time around, a few of us got together to create a team. However we were not all from the same running club (1 Dartford Road Runner and 3 Dartford Harriers), so we needed a team name to run under. I had spent some days trying to come up with a decent one, but it had eluded me until, a few hours before the race one of our team was seriously considering pulling out due to a sore hamstring.

After a bit of a discussion, he decided to proceed and that lead me to proposing the name 'Hurty Hammie and the Hoops' (Hoops being the nickname for Dartford Harriers). So after a bit of post-work rushing around we finally arrived at the venue and headed for the registration desk.

'hurly hommie and the hoops'

We paid out £10 entry fee and began to discuss which order we should run in - this discussion always comes up in relays and over the last few years, I have become a big fan of starting with the predicted slowest runner and getting progressively faster, finishing with the quickest. We all agreed that it was a sound plan and we went ahead with that method.

With our name recorded incorrectly on the official paperwork, for the evening we became 'Hurly Hommie and the Hoops' which sounds a bit like the name of a 1950s/60s band. We all actually ended up liking it despite the spelling errors. The race start time was scheduled for 7.15pm and at around that point the first set of runners from all 28 teams were despatched...

On lead guitar and vocals was 'Hurly Hommie' himself (richey), and while he held back a bit to protect that hamstring, still put in a respectable time of 06.52 (team position 23). He handed the imaginary baton over to the rhythm guitarist (me) for the second leg of the race.

putting in the effort with about 100 metres to go [photo: brian page]

I managed to pick off seven runners on my way around the course, which is mostly on grass and is generally flat-ish, but it does have a little incline and bumpy trail to deal with about half-way through. I went around in 05.47 and was happy to have achieved my goal of running under 6 minutes.

With the race half-way done, we were sitting in 16th position. I handed the virtual baton over to our funky bass player (adam). With a time of 05.21, he had managed overtake six runners and moved us up into 10th position.

Our grand finale was left in the hands of our man-on-the-sticks (jon) who smashed out an amazing drum solo and left the crowd mesmerised with his 04.56 effort. In the process, he had picked off another 3 runners and brought us home in 7th position overall.

The full results were online a few days later and our combined time was 22.56. I did of course record the GPS data of the course and you can view it on Strava: Swanley Relays 2017