Phillip Howells reports....
I tackled the normally 20 mile tough run of the Grizzly in East Devon today, a cult event with such a following that even though it allows 2,000 runners is always closed within two weeks of entries opening in the previous September. Conditions were amongst the toughest in its history, with very strong and bitter winds hardly above freezing such that the route was reduced by 1.5 miles because one of the beach runs was deemed too dangerous. The race starts along half a mile of pebble beach in Seaton so that the first mile was run off in a slick 13 minutes (and that was just for the first 25% of the field that I was in). It then tackles clip top paths, more sections of pebble beach, steep muddy paths made very slippy by recent rain and a 200 yard stretch of muddy 'bog' which is literally more than knee deep of either chocolate-drink-like runny stuff or the glutinous sort that captures shoes and more if you are not careful! It ends over a cruel stretch of nearly a mile of pebble beach and once over the line you then experience the joys of the local fire service offering a fire-hose of full-force water straight from the sea with scrubbing brushes to get rid of the caked mud on shoes and legs - it works at least! Then we all get the much coveted, usual quirky teashirt as a lasting momento of the fun of that year.
Given that my legs were a bit heavy from the speed training on Friday and a 35 mile bike ride and ten mile run on Saturday, I was satisfied to finish a respectable 347th of 1,528 finishers, 11th of 163 runners over 55 (120 in the MVO55 cat alone) in a time of 3hrs 5mins exactly, less than an hour behind the winning time of 2-12-46