On Sunday, 24 intrepid members of LBAC braved the wilds around the edge of Milton Keynes to take on the Round MK relay. This is a four leg relay starting and finishing in Stony Stratford with 32 miles of variable terrain in between. Our six LBAC teams were split into approximately even teams so that ther could be some sort of race without it really mattering too much.

 A warm start to the day meant that those on legs one and two had the most heat to contend with, but that did balance out as they also had the best under foot conditions, with most of legs 3 and 4 being off road.

All six LBAC teams set off within 8 minutes of each other, with only two teams from MKAC starting behind and others up to an hour in front. The aim was for all the teams to finish back in Stony at around 1.30pm. I am pleased to report a number of things;

1. No-one got lost. The course is not marshalled at all and down the years there has been many instances of people ending up running a lot further than planned!
2. All our teams were within 8 minutes of the 1.30 target time. the furthest out was down to having a ringer in the team who ran faster than I thought and Lynn's Layabouts were the closest overall, finishing just 58 second after the clock had ticked past 1.30.
3. Amy made it through the day without going into labour. This may have made running leg three tricky for me, and we would have been without a timekeeper!
4. Simon and Billy were the fastest on their respective legs, with Simon setting a new course record for leg three.
5. Laura's Loungers were third quickest team overall and Jane's Joggers were third on the age-graded handicap.

All in all, pretty successful, but made all the more so by everyone doing their bit and getting involved in what I hope was a fun day out in the MK sunshine.

The results are listed here. I've edited ours so that the seconds are pretty much correct. Don't look for exact detail on the others though, I think they were rounded up and down by a few seconds and I think there may have been issues with adding up the seconds to base 60!

Results