The Fairford Festival 10km, as the name implies, is run as part of a weekend of festivities in the town where I work. Both the festival and the race, plus associated 3km fun run, have been going for many years and have been highly successful. Unfortunately this year things changed. The organisers manifestly failed to market the race with no flyers distributed at other local races or to nearby clubs. As a consequence the race almost didn't go ahead because of lack of entries - this at a time when most races close entries early and have to turn people away.
Of course this meant that Cirencester were able to clean up, we managed five of the top eight places and the only reason we didn't have the race winner was because Chris overslept, see his Blog for more! Jon Young's photo shows the beeming winning team of Adrian Williams, Chris Illman & me with the delightful Sharron Davies.The next evening Cirencester promoted the Westonbirt Arboretum 10km, the course threading its way through the winding footpaths of this beautiful area near Tetbury & Highgrove. Entries closed weeks ago at 750 and organiser Dave Edelsten could easily have accepted double that number. As ever with Dave's organisation, everything went very smoothly; it was a spectacular sight seeing such large numbers spread throughout the grounds of the Arboretum. With a sapling tree for each finisher there was also a bit of novelty for all as well.
The Westonbirt results have been published this morning, just a few hours after the race finished. The Fairford results have also been published today but because the second finisher's time was not recorded all results are incorrect! Apparently the fun run results are even worse. If people pay out £8-10 for a 10km race they expect decent organisation. At Westonbirt they got it, at Fairford they didn't.
