Ben Rinnes Written on July 26, 2009, by andys.
Rocky section at Ben Rinnes summit
The Ben Rinnes switchbacks
For a Scottish hill race Ben Rinnes is a very fast and, apart from the odd plunge from giant peat haggs, a pretty much entirely runnable course.
I’m normally more of a fan of races which scale rough, rocky, high mountain summits, but after a couple of weeks of scrambling about the Italian Alps and Dolomites it was nice to do something a bit different and get the legs moving a semi decent pace again.
The 5th and final climb
Very runnable course
After the Alpine excursion and training camp which included some long days on the bikes and on foot in the hills (see via ferrata photos etc below) I’ve come back feeling pretty fit (which is after all the purpose of training camps!). So I set of pretty hard reasonably confident that the legs would hold out. Coming into the last few miles I was checking my watch and realised that it was going to be very close call as to whether I’d get the course record. I had a comfortable lead of about five minutes, but with the record incentive I ran flat out for the last few miles, legged it round the obligatory highland games sports field (to the delight of the crowd!), dived for the line and stopped my watch on 1hr56’55”, five seconds under Jon Duncan’s 9 year old record – it was worth the effort.
Results at: http://shr.uk.com/NewsItems.aspx?NewsItemID=561
