Calne Leisure Centre Clock Change Challenge

The Calne Leisure Centre Clock Change Challenge is a 10K that takes place on an out and back route mainly on twisty county lanes. As its name suggests it takes place twice a year and it starts and finishes at the Leisure Centre in Calne (in Wiltshire about 18 miles from Swindon).

Tantalisingly, the water station at 5K was in the grounds of the pub shown in the photo! It's the Ivy Inn in Heddington.

Given its regular occurrence, you would think that everything would run like clockwork. However, for me there were two problems with the race: although my Garmin made it 10K, I don't think the K markers were accurately positioned and on the twisty lane runners were frequently switching from one side of the road to the other even though there were lots of cars about.

I've since looked at the Course Measurement web site and on the page for this race it says full width of country lanes available. My understanding is that this means the race cuts the corners, taking the racing line around the bends. On a reasonably busy road I think this is extremely dangerous.

To be fair to me I joined in all this switching: I reckoned we were all in this together!

It got even sillier when we met runners coming the other way: sometimes we ran on the left, they on the right; sometimes we were on the right, they were on our left; and sometimes they ran down the middle between some of us on the left and others on the right!

The race was won by Simon Nott, a 17 year old from John Bentley School/Calne Running Club. He finished in 33m20s beating 33m48s, his time last March. Tony Lock of Witney Road Runners finished 5th in 36m29s.

The above photo was taken by Maurice Pullin. It is copyright Maurice Pullin and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.