Andy Collins, Billy Haines and Stephen Shorrocks.set out on this challenging run around Snowden. The sting is in the tail of this race, as after 17 miles, you have to ascend almost 3,000 ft before doing a similar descent to the finish. Adam Fieldhouse led from early on and he never lost that lead. By the first check point, Andy was in third place and going well.with Stephen a couple of places behind him. Throughout the race the position of Stephen varied between 5th and 7th and he finally ran out in that position and finishing first MV40.
After briefly dropping to 4the position, Andy settled into 3rd position and baring a mishap, that looked like it would be his finishing position. However, on the final leg, Simon Jones, who had been steadily rising through the field, swept passed the 2nd and 3rd place runners to take 2nd place and pushing Andy down to 4th in the process.
Billy Haines adopted a different strategy from Andy and went off quite steady before moving up the field in the second half of the race to finish in 8th place. .
Andy must be disappointed that he did not have a podium finish, but nevertheless, it was a good performance from all Barlickers to have three finishers in the top ten out of 251 starters.
1Adam Fieldhouse 4:13:59
4 Andy Collins 4:41:30
7 Stephen Shorrocks 4:47:32 First FV40
8 Billy Haines 4:54:01
There was also a women's race and there were two Barlickers in the top twenty. They finished as follows:
13 Helen Harrison 6:08:49
14 Katie Towers 6:10:59
35 Amanda Haines 7:00:14