Christmas Handicap 2015

Sunday 27th December

Belinda won which delighted everyone and was presented with the Sue Hool Trophy by Chairman Chris.

I had been concerned this year, as the numbers swelled, that the system might start to creak. Fortunately, Paul, Dave and Christine have looked after the start and finish forever and coped with comfort. The innovation, Rob brought the Parkrun position tokens, worked well with Chris Grimes correlating positions and names on the finish sheet. One hitch was token 26, which disappeared. But even this is a heart-warming Christmas story, Stephen has never finished as high as 26 in a race before and was so proud that he took the token into the shower with him.

The asset of the Handicap route is that it is a course of two halves so favours nobody. We have run it in the ice when frankly it was unsafe and I wondered how the second half would have survived the rain which this morning’s Observer described as being, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, ‘of biblical proportions‘. In fact it survived remarkably well with only Simon and Peter reduced to mincing. 

Thanks to Malcolm, Jon, Martin, Steve, Trevor and others who marshaled, we appear not to have lost anyone.

And a big thanks to everyone who brought food, it would be unfair to single-out even Jan for the quality.

I have split the race into, those who are not regular Wilmslow racers and whose handicaps are something of a work of fiction, and those who were competing for the Sue Hool on whom I can exercise my statistical prowess (I was talking to runbritain/power of 10, our methodologies are very similar).