Wrekin Fell Race with Head Cam

Location: The Wrekin, Telford, UK
Date: 29th March

Workout: The Wrekin Fell Race

Post workout nutrition: this, 15 minutes later.

Total Time: 57:11

In the first few seconds of the video just after the starting whistle, I can be heard saying

"I was in no doubt about that."

With this video camera, you can only really hear what I am saying. What Lightning had just said was something to the effect of

"You realise you look a dick with that strapped on your head, right?"



I'm getting a little better with Windows Movie Maker now, so I edited the start to cut out some gibberish I was spouting in the first few minutes and some pointless pre-race footage.

Since this was made, I have also managed to set the clock on the device, so it will no longer seem to suggest that these videos are archived footage from 2008.

Nevertheless, the video still ends before anything interesting has happened - just over 10 minutes into the race. I need to buy an 8 gig SD card, which will quadruple the capacity and allow me to film more than just the most boring part of the race.

At 3:10, Lightning hoves into view, sporting his own mini-cam mounted on the back of his waist bag. This sparks a conversation about the fact that I'm filming him, filming me - which, retrospectively, is ironic because he'd mistakenly failed to turn his on. At 5:00 I overtake him and that's the last we see of him in the video. However, about 5 minutes later, on the first, steep downhill section he did come hurtling past.

Later, I doggedly trudged past him on an equally steep uphill section and managed to hold the lead of a minute or two for the rest of the race.

Lightning's a pretty good downhiller, mainly because he knows no fear, and I am vulnerable on very steep, loose ground because my Vibrams are no match for his studded fell shoes. Thus, the discrepancy between our respective times to the Wrekin summit, which we tend to use as the benchmark of our relative fitness, are not necessarily the best comparison of overall fell running prowess.

Here's the satellite map of the route - it was up, down, up - then back the way we had come:

You can see the altitude profile here:

The long, flat part at the start is actually standing around waiting to start, not a long flat section. Considering the right hand side should be a mirror image of the left (ignoring the flat section), this does give you an idea of how accurate the GPS is on altitude.

One useful aspect to this outing was some experience of The Ercall, another hill North East of The Wrekin that Lightning and I might now more often incorporate into our training runs.

Finally - a photo of me towards the end, camera askew, for some reason saluting the photographer!