What doesn’t Kielder makes you stronger

GoodGym crews of Newcastle and York joined forces to tackle a weekend of brutal races in Kielder Forest!

First on the schedule was the 10 mile race, taking part were... Tim, Mitch, Stef, Tristan, Becky, Maddy and Emily. Whilst they were all getting ready for that, Leanne and I attempted to trail run to Scotland. At the top of Deadwater Fell we discovered that there was no good trail to the border so we admired it from a distance and ran back. Luckily, we were back in time to see the rest of the crew heading out on their run.

Saturday night saw the night time 10k with Becky, Tristan, Leanne, Stef, Mitch and Beth. Power couple Becky and Tristan both came 4th whilst Emily and Maddy took on the important duty of saving us all space in the pub.

Stat-man Tim worked out that the combined times of both Saturday's races put Tristan in 1st place overall and saw Mitch and Tim come 4th and 5th respectively, amazing work!

On Sunday morning, Becky, Leanne, Tristan and Mitch ran to Scotland along the road.

They made a rule that every time a car was coming, they got out of the way and did some fitness including: lunges, squats, high knees, heel kicks, mountain climbers, upper body twists, star jumps, curtsey lunges, reverse lunges, side lunges, can can kicks and the highland fling. (Turns out there were lot of people driving down the road to register for the duathlon!)

Evan led out the GoodGymers in the duathlon, and it was an exciting race after that as Karen, Stef and I all came back from the first run within minutes of each other. The bike was brutally hard with well over 400m of climbing in '20k'. We learned that none of the distances were entirely accurate either.

We got some massive cheers at transition from the Scotland gang and the on-course support crew of Lizzie, Emily and Maddy popped up all over the place to give us a mid-race boost.

The battle was on as (apart from speedy Evan), we all came into T2 close together too.

Karen and I did big high fives when we learned we were 6th and 7th overall, yay!