TROTS Dambusters, Llysyfran, 5 June 2011

Race report by Ian Speed

After triathlons for a couple of weekends in a row I’d planned a quiet weekend, but made a last minute decision to go to the “Dambusters” 10K at Llys-y-Fran last Sunday. I don’t usually do off-road races, my ankle’s never completely recovered from a silly fall training on a rough trail three years ago and I’ve learnt to love the tarmac since then, but the sun was shining and I’d heard good reports about the course, so I thought I’d give it a go .... I found the venue a bit more easily than I’d expected, got myself entered and went for a jog around about. Great venue with a beautiful reservoir-side setting, and cafe, camp site, toilets, etc, all available on site. The race starts on the opposite side of dam (no excuse not to warm-up properly), and we were gently herded over there as start time approached.

The pre-race briefing was pretty straightforward, along the lines of “Go clockwise and keep the lake on your right, you can’t go wrong.” Seconds later the starter called us to the line .... “Ready”, “Set”, and then his air-horn failed to go off but everyone started anyway, the starter mumbled “.... uh, go on then”, and we were away. The first 200 yards were across a small car park so quite wide, then the field funnelled through a gate and downhill along a narrow-ish track. I pushed-on off the line to stay ahead of the initial melee and found myself running with the lead bunch for the first kilometre. We went through that in under four minutes (way too fast for me!) I looked around and noticed the guy running next to me had “Snowden Marathon 2010 – 2hrs-53min” tattooed on his shoulder and realised I was a long way out of position!

The first half of the course twists and turns around the inlets on the far side of the reservoir, and while there are no long hills, there’s a constant series of short and sometimes quite steep “undulations”. The upshot is you usually can’t see very far ahead, and for a first-timer like me it was quite disorientating figuring how far I’d travelled around the water. Some of the faster folks who would usually already be in the distance by this stage were starting to pick me off now as I settled into a more realistic pace. The race went through it’s “tough stage” for me at around half-distance, until I got onto the second half, which flattens and straightens out a bit and there’s a good sense of “on the way back”. I managed to more-or-less hang onto the back of a bunch of “Trots” runners, and before I knew it I was up through the caravan/camping field and over the finish line, for a “towards-the-front-of-the-mid-pack” kind of result. There was the usual water/sustenance at the finish, and pretty much everyone hung around and waited for the rest of the field to return, which was nice.

Lessons learnt? Just the usual one really .... start slower, target a negative split, blah, blah, blah .... I’ve allegedly learnt that lesson loads of times already, but still keep making the same mistake!

Would I go back? For sure .... great venue (will take the camper van and stay over next year), well organised (as always by the Trots club), and I enjoyed a bit of mileage off of the usual tarmac. In fact, so much that I picked up an entry form for the Preseli fell race later in the year, will give that one a go too I think ....

Results for Club members below: