Dry, warm weather greeted 6 of our runners as they made their way to Heath Rugby Club for a 7am start of this years Calderdale Way Relay, the race in it’s 33rd year is Britain’s biggest club run off road event attracting teams from as far as Sale and Denby Dale.

The race itself is 50 mile circular route of Calderdale with a total ascent of over 8500ft, teams are made up of 12 runners covering the whole distance split into 6 legs, with each leg run in pairs. The race starts at Clay House Park, West Vale at 8am and with strict cut off times for each leg any team finishing with the baton 6-7 hours later have done extremely well. 

This year QRC had its best ever turn out for the race with us been able to enter 3 teams, 36 of us spread across the route. Leg 1 starts in West Vale and finishes  in Crag Vale, leg 2 via Stoodley Pike and into Todmorden, leg 3 boasts are steep 1 mile climb to start with before heading over to Black Shaw Head, leg 4 heads to Wainstalls passing to leg 5 runners who set off towards Shelf, from here it’s left to the leg 6 runners with a 10.5 mile sprint back into West Vale for the glory finish. 

With the wing team completing the course in a under 6 hours Calder Valley Fell Runners were awarded 1st place with some magnificent leg times, with Ben Mounsey running legs 1+3.

QRC A produced a superb run finishing in 18th place in a time of 7:03:13, smashing the club record by 9 minutes, excellent work guys. In 57th came QRC B with an overall time of 8:26:00 and unfortunately missing the leg 5 cut off by 23 minutes. QRC C finished in 87th place in a time of 10:05:08 pretty impressive considering this was the 1st time the majority of the team has run off road over this distance.

Just a few Random pictures of some of our runners during Sundays race and a full split of all the results below.

Well done everybody, great running for our club.