When I was car sharing with Anna, who is heavily involved in the organisation of the Eryri Harriers, she asked if I was available for the Welsh Castles Relay. It would be in early June. I doubted it. At the time, it wasn't quite clear when the annual family reunion would be, but that weekend was a serious contender, and in addition, that would also be the weekend in which Jaco would turn 60. These two things in combination were already worrying me! And plans for Jaco’s birthday hadn't been made yet, but it was very likely it would get in the way. So I said no.
The family reunion in the end was the weekend before. And while I was in the Netherlands for that, I received a message from Marjan: the birthday dinner she had planned was cancelled for reasons of a funeral. Oh no!
With all that, I certainly was available that weekend, but it was too late to register to run. But then a message came through from the Harriers. Two marshals had had to pull out. They desperately needed replacements. So I volunteered. And it would be all day, but well, so be it.
The marshalling came with car sharing with one of our two chairpersons: James. I didn't know him very well. I figured that might change that day…
At 7:30 I was ready to roll. So was James, who picked me up from home. So we set off. It's a long way! We had to go all the way to Merthyr Tydfil. And that took about 3.5 hours. A lot of talking about running took place. And about a few other things. Time went by quite quickly!
We were heading for the start of the leg of the relay race we would be marshalling. We had been given a postcode and a 'what three words' code. We got to a rather full car park, but it didn’t seem the right one. There was another one down the hill where we found a spot. It didn’t have the right name, though. But we were deep in the Bannau Brycheiniog and there was no signal of any kind. We walked to the other parking lot to see if that helped. And then we just settled on the other one, waiting for the others to turn up.
It was a long time since breakfast and I was ravenous. I sat down for combined elevensies and lunch. James went to the other car park again to catch any Harrier ending up there. I would stay put and catch those coming my way.
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Making myself comfortable while waiting for the other marshals |
By the time everyone had reached ‘our’ car park the race was about to begin. We had to hurry! And we got an escort from a local. Probably just as well. We dropped the various marshals at their stations. James and I were towards the end. We would guide the runners over a T-junction. They would come charging down a tiny sloping road onto a flat, much bigger road. We were there mainly for safety, but also for showing the way, and general encouragement.
After a while we saw the first runner. It had begun! We cheered and clapped and pointed. We barely had any traffic to deal with.
We were about a mile from the finish, so the field was quite spread out. And there was one runner we actually knew: Eryri Harrier Sam. There were only 61 runners in the race, so even spread out it didn't take very long for all of them to pass. I think we were only on station for half an hour! And then our job was done again. We had driven 160 miles for that.
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Sam coming around the corner |
We convened with the other nearby marshals. There was some handing out of T-shirts and thank-you presents. The latter from Anna! That was very sweet of her. I got some lovely chocolates.
Then we all had it off. We obviously had a long way to drive back. And it was even longer than the way down, as there was more traffic on the road. I got a rather yawny, and James said he would've struggled if he wouldn't have had a passenger. That made me feel a bit better about having sacrificed my entire day to half an hour of clapping.
I was home by about 6 pm. But I did find good news when I got there; there was a WhatsApp group with people involved in the race, and Nia-Meleri, the other chairperson, had talked to the race organisation, and negotiated that next year, the Eryri Harriers can do all their marshalling tasks in the north. That will save us the soul-destroying and climate-destroying slog all the way down to South Wales! Excellent.
So what about next year? Well! If our family reunion ends up in that weekend I will probably be ok with that. But if it isn't, I'd like to run. And that doesn't exclude marshalling; you can do both. I think there are six legs on each day, so as long as they are not consecutive, you can run one leg and marshal another. But we'll see! It is a long way away. But I must admit I have been slightly bitten by this bug…