Jamie reports:

I had a new pair of Trail shoe to try out and I was planning on heading down to the Malvern Hills for a training run.  However on impulse I trawled Runners World website on Saturday night and found this 10 mile off-road race down near Stroud the next day.

The organisation was relaxed to say the least.  Parking was in a farm courtyard and the registration was in a barn!  There were around 150 of us running and it started with about a mile uphill on a country road before heading into the woods.  Two heavily undulating laps of the woods followed by the long road downhill back to the finish completed a challenging course which was made a little more fun by the recent rain making the woods relatively slippy.

I settled into second place at the top of the first road section but couldn’t catch the leader for the first few miles.  However a long muddy downhill section allowed me to test the grip on the new Trail Shoes and I caught my adversary.  For the next loop we were nip and tuck until we came back to the same long muddy downhill and I decided to make a move.  Again my better grip helped and I opened up a gap which I held to win.  I was also pleased to run under an hour for a fairly testing 10 mile-ish run.

The post race drinks and presentations were equally low-key and the event raises money for a school in the Gambia, so I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of mud and a good atmosphere.

Standish results here

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I had a couple of good Highland Games races when I was on holiday, winning the first and coming tenth in the British Hill Racing Champs at Alva.  If you fancy the most psychotic hill race ever you have to look at Alva! 

Alva results and photos here