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The second coming (or was that going?) of the White Horse Just lately I’ve started to feel like a born again runner. I’ve hit what for me is the magic figure of 15 miles a week in training and I can sense the inner athlete in me starting to warm up and wondering if he might just need those unused cross country spikes that he bought over a decade ago. I think it started at the Cleveland Way Relay. I arrived a bit early for my leg and was stood there, a lone figure in the wilderness of the North York Moors, hoping that someone would turn up at that exact spot and tig me and worrying about how I would get back when I wasn’t at all sure that my calf would even get me there. Then, like Elisha in the Old Testament, I found myself surrounded by the chariots of fire as a convoy of Quakers turned up and I was part of a team and no longer just a less talented Alf Tupper. Symbolically, for me at least, the person who arrived to tig me was Jes Smith, one of the oldest of the old guard (Last week I pulled an old dusty cardboard file marked athletics from the attic and to my surprise found a 90s Quakers newsletter with a poem on fell running by Jes “The Jester”). I hadn’t seen him in ten years and I even had to ask his wife if that was really the same Jes who would be coming down the hill (I’ll let you guess what she might have said).
Then it was off in pursuit of Julie Jeffries, who Lucy had launched across the Moors some ten minutes earlier. Julie had got round the Durham Dales the day before and her legs no longer seemed to bend at the knee, so “launched” is used in its broadest sense; even so she took some catching. I thought I was gaining several times but when the sun is in your eyes and sweat streaks your brow, sheep can look an awful lot like Julie Jeffries in a Quakers vest. I caught her about half way and we had a pleasant chat for a few minutes, so pleasant that we missed the track and started going the wrong way up the short cut, not that it was any more, the first rule of short cuts being that they only work one way. By the time I’d realised that I’d moved some distance ahead but with the two club mottos of “Ubi sumis” and “No Quaker is left behind” ringing in my ears, I waited for her to catch up. Appropriately we met a Cleveland Search and Rescue runner coming the right way down the short cut and were soon rotated around 180 degrees but it did mean that Julie ran 25 miles in two days rather than 24.
The finish was a repeat of the start with line of Quakers to cheer us down the final hill and ply us with drinks and massages (sorry I made that last item up but you never know). Best of all was the gathering in Helmsley at the end, perched on the monument as Nick gave out his personalised Neolithic tool kit souvenirs (mine resembles the type of tool favoured by Homo erectus about 35,000 years ago, just before they became extinct). Helmsley is probably my favourite place and never disappoints but being there having pitted yourself against the Moors in a run, I feel, makes you part of the place, not just a visitor.
Quasi-religious themes, it seems, always go in a full circle hence my rapture at the resurrection of the White Horse Handicap. For those of you who have only heard this spoken of in hushed, reverential terms, when you have bought Mike Horan a pint, the WHH is a 5.3 mile trail race (assuming this new fangled GPS technology doesn’t say different) through the best of Darlington’s countryside. As well as the scenery it offers the opportunity to baptise a new generation of Quakers in the life-giving waters of the River Skerne (I’m waxing lyrical, in reality Weil’s disease and septicaemia are more likely than eternal life; always read the small print). But more than that but we will once again be able to chant the runner’s mantra, “there is no finer purpose in life than a summer evening’s trail race and there is no finer trail race than the White Horse Handicap”
Ps if anyone might take offence at my religious allusions, I should point out that I’m not really the Messiah, I’m just a very naughty boy.
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