Taking part in the English National Cross Country Championships has been one of the highlights of every running year for me since I joined my running club Ilkley Harriers. The Nationals are open championships in the proper sense of the word. Besides paying the modest entry fee, the only requirement for participation is that you are a member of a running club in England. Your running ability is not questioned, there is no minimum standard. You don’t even have to be English 😉. The Nationals are always staged in late February and follow more regional competitions that have taken place over the winter, for us these are the West Yorkshire races and then the Yorkshire and the Northern Championships. The races attract a lot of fast runners, and virtually all current English elite middle or long-distance runners, and also many triathletes, have taken part in the Nationals in the past and many have won the title, either as juniors or seniors.
But behind the elite runners you will find the sub-elite and the good club runners, and behind them are the steadier club runners like myself. Definitely at the very steady end! In vast fields (often around 1000 runners in the senior women’s race and 2000 in the senior men’s race) you will see a huge range of ages, shapes, sizes, and running abilities and speeds. Cross country running is a great leveller. Everyone battles with the same potentially ankle-twisting uneven ground, the same mud, the same hills, and the same winter weather conditions. The race is not about times, not about sticking to a meticulously calculated minute per mile pace as you would on the road, but simply about finishing positions, making your way around the course as quickly as possible and beating as many other runners in the process.
It can be brutal, depending on the course and the ground conditions. This kind of running is as much about strength as about speed, your energy is sapped by the mud and if conditions are bad enough it can be difficult to maintain any forward momentum especially on the inclines. It is not uncommon for runners to lose a shoe (a woman running next to me in the recent Northern Championships lost both!). If however there has been a very dry spell the course can be quite free of mud, like it was last weekend at the Nationals held at Bolesworth Castle in Cheshire. A relatively flat and grassy circuit with minimal mud made for a very fast but relentless course, which all of us from Ilkley found very tough going, though I ran my fastest ever off road mile I think in the first mile of the 5 mile course. Give me mud and hills any day! Still, it isn’t meant to be easy. Cross country is tough and therefore excellent training for all your other running, whether that is road, trail, fell or ultra.
What I like most about the Nationals is the festival atmosphere with all the club tents and flags, the opportunity to be totally immersed in running (if not in mud) for the day, to watch some of the best runners in the country in action and to spend time with my club mates. Oh, and the opportunity to buy the merchandise. How many National XC hoodies does one girl need 😂 (I managed to restrain myself this year).
The Nationals have also been likened in this nice newspaper article to the experience of a medieval battle without the chainmail, largely in connection to the spectacle of the mass starts. The event rotates between the North and the South of England and I have been to the Nationals at Donington Park, Wollaton Park (x 2), Harewood House, Parliament Hill (x 2) and Bolesworth Castle. I love the muddy course in Wollaton Park, but for atmosphere I think Parliament Hill in London is unbeatable. To watch the runners start at the bottom of the hill and charge upwards towards you when you are a spectator is brilliant, you can actually feel the vibrations in the ground. To be in the middle of that pack (well, towards the back to be honest in my case) is even more awesome, it actually made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. On the way up the hill you cross two narrow paths, and the sound of the thousands of spikes clicking across them is a stand-out memory for me. I hope to run in many more championships there in years to come. But for now the cross country season has come to an end for me, the spikes have been cleaned and returned to the shoe cupboard.
