For a blast from the past, Ged Cudahy recommends watching the video of the 1985 Karrimor International Mountain Marathon.
It features the likes of John Richardson, Mike Cudahy and the infamous Joss Naylor.
Here is a link to the video on YouTube (click here)
and, ouch, that does look painful John!
Thanks for uploading this Ged – a great watch!
There’s at least one other Rucksack Club member featured – fast forward to 18:40mins and see if you recognise another former President 🙂
Cheers, Dom
The one and only Rob Ferguson ( and Dave Crutch). Also includes Phil Burke, a brilliant runner and climber that I was at school with!
I found it a great watch as well!
I wonder if I may reminisce about the Karrimor? 1988 was the 21st anniversary of the event and was held in the Cheviots. I completed a number around that time. There is a YouTube film for that year also and again John and Mike feature. I was an orienteer with Guildford Orienteers who could run a bit as was my partner Alun Jones of TVOC. We did the Score course, just a long one in those days, as it meant we were not in a long file and could chose a route to suit us. We had a piece of string the length of which corresponded to the distance we reckoned we could do in the time available and we laid this around the controls available to plan the optimum route.
Day One was fine and bright and we did ok, nothing special. Day Two was raining and the mist was down. Our best option we thought was to go a mile or two north from the overnight camp and directly away from the finish. Quite bold we thought at the time. We were going well and the navigation was great. Approaching the finish we decided we could get an extra control which we duly did but we hadn’t reckoned on how high the hill with the final control was. The upshot was we finished in a breathless heap with 20 seconds to spare. How close can you get?!
There were prizes for the 21st finishers on each course. We were 22nd and the finishers immediately in front of us had supposedly done a quite impossible course. Protests were to no avail! And the final upset was we failed to pick up an easy control early on which we passed within 50 yards of and whose additional score would have enable us to beat our club aces. Both have rankled ever since!