Fell running may include bogs and easy scrambling, as well as forest or meadows, but will always have hills as a central component. For a fell running race, participants will be expected to have mountain navigation skills and carry suitable safety equipment.
Additional articles published before can be found at our previous blog location at naturetravels. What is Trail Running? The word fell itself is derived from the Old Norse word fjall meaning mountain. Common usage was subsequently refined to refer to the heather covered hills of Northern England, the Isle of Man, and Scotland. Trail running has its origins in the USA.
The idea came from a group of runners chatting in a bar. It is amazing the number of hair-brained sporting ideas was started by a group of guys chatting in a bar. Getting back to trail running though.
A group of runners from San Francisco were sitting in a bar in Mill Valley. The Dipsea Inn had just opened for business at Stinson Beach. Between them and the Dipsea Inn were the trails of Mount Tamalpais. So the runners made a bet, as runners sitting in a bar tend to do. The official version states that it was a bet to see who could run to the Dipsea Inn the fastest.
I suspect that it was combined with the runner finishing in the last place paying for drinks as well. As a result on 19 November the wonderful sport of trail running was born with the first edition of what went on to become The Dipsea Race. Fell running, on the other hand, owes its roots to King Malcolm Canmore who needed a new swift messenger. A race was organized in Braemar, Scotland, in Later it would become a key event in the Braemar Gathering that evolved into the Highland Games Gathering.
When it comes to trail running it is the sheer distance that makes most events so hard. A hundred miles has become an event standard for ultra trail races across the USA. When you add the It is run in five laps of theoretically twenty miles each before taking elevation changes into account.
In reality, each lap is closer to 26 miles, in other words, a marathon. At first glance, the sixty-hour cut off time of the Barkley Marathons seems generous. The reality is somewhat different. The first edition of the Barkley Marathons was in In fact, in the first 32 editions, only 15 runners had beat the cut off, and only two of those had done so more than once.
Even the fabled Bob Graham Round in the English Lake District that traverses forty-two Lakeland fells within 24 hours is only a distance of 66 miles. Fell runs do not traditionally follow any path. That in itself makes progress a lot slower. For starters, you need to pick your own line that zigzags between clumps of knee-length heather. Add to that the going underfoot will be muddy to the point of marginal traction. There is also no way that you can follow the line of the runner just in front of you as they will have churned up the mud into a sloppy slush.
Large trail running events require massive and detailed infrastructure. To start with there are routes of a hundred miles or more that need detailed route markings.
These route markings need to be cleared together with a full trash sweep after the event. Long events mean that athletes burn an insane amount of calories. Do some people do both? Fell is a term mainly used in the Lake District to describe mountains or high moorland. A trail is a track or path predominantly in countryside areas and is often well signed and easy to follow. Fell running, although a minority sport, has been taking place in the UK for many years with the Fell Runners Association FRA set up in the s to oversee the sport.
Trail running on the other hand is a relatively new sport having its roots in America and Europe and which has only emerged in the UK within the past 10 years but is showing a huge increase in popularity; the Lakeland Trails Series began in and now attracts over 10, runners. The stereotypical image of the fell runner may be a stringy, bearded old man in a vest running up a rough hillside and there may be some truth in that!
There is certainly more extrinsic value in winning a top trail race than a British or English championship fell race. Er no! I remember on one race the set route was along a big track with a bend in it. I could see the fastest route was to cut the corner and go straight across the fell. Instinctively I started to go that way but then I realised that it was not allowed, it would be cheating to do so and unfair if I went that way and every else followed the prescribed route.
So I went back on the track and reluctantly followed the correct route. On fell races, most people blindly follow the person in front. But I will often deliberately go a different route between checkpoints. It is also worth pointing out that they have different safety kit requirements that need checking before running. Consider the two races that took place on 22 May in the Lake District.
0コメント