Scotland (FVO) hosted 7 – 8th September 2024

SHI Co-ordinator: Dawn Goddard FVO

Individual: Edinchip – alongside SOL #4

Balmy weather with blue skies made the views at Lochearnhead a treat. A 2km trek in from the car park was a good warm-up, once we knew which direction we had to leave the car park!

The team was mostly composed of reserves, with some being quite far down the reserves list. The SHIs is a great top-quality competition and it is a shame many runners are not giving it the priority it deserves. Obviously it is great other runners can take advantage of this competition, but it is nice to be competitive and win.

The M20s and W21s rose to the challenge well and both drew with Scotland. The M21s were fairly outclassed into second with SCO taking the first 3 and 8th places (we managed 5th and 7th as our best) and in the W20s, SCO made a clean sweep of the first 3 places.

Like last year, Ireland and Wales did not field complete teams, with Wales being particularly disadvantaged by having no M20s present, meaning they could not score any points in the Men’s Relay, and were resigned to coming last however they ran, which was a shame for IRE, who got a bit of a walk over.

Day 1 Individual
Edinchip

  Men Women Overall
England 12 12 24
Scotland 14 14 28
Ireland 7 5 12
Wales 3 5 8

Relay: Callandar Crags – alongside a 1-Person Relay / SoSOL Middle Distance Race.

Men: The weather had turned but stayed dry for the racing. One of the spectator controls was an interesting ‘statue’ of Mel Gibson!

We decided to break the SCO stranglehold by loading the 1st team and it very nearly worked. Euan Tryner took the lead on the second leg to hand over with a 33 second lead to the chasing Scots. And we held that lead for a while but Nathan Lawson made a mistake and let Matthew Gooch SCO seize the day to win by an annoying 8 seconds.

We were also hoping the second Men’s team could stay ahead of the Scots and after Phil Vokes on Leg 2, we were in 2nd , 16 seconds up on the chasing Scot first team. But it wasn’t to be as our team went backwards but luckily held onto 4th. The ENG non-scoring 3rd team soared through the field on last leg with Joe Woodley bringing them up 2 places to beat the Scots 3rd team – but it was a hollow victory, resulting in no extra points.

Only 5 men in total broke 100 minutes on M21 – just one ENG.

Women: This was always going to be tough, especially with all the SCO W20s being JWOC runners in their home country, and two of ours selected had turned down selection for various reasons. We battled on of course but all 3 SCO Women’s teams dispatched our 3 teams comfortably, with their 3rd team being nearly 6 minutes ahead of our best team.

Courses had long winning times, as is now the case. 7 athletes broke 100 minutes on W21, including all 4 of our scorers.

Annoyingly there was one W21 mp which, like 5 others in other nation, was a control which competitors visited twice which was also a drinks point. Otherwise, there were no other mps.

Scotland thus won the Dolgellau Bowl for Day 1.

Day 2 Relay
Callander Crags

  Men Women Overall
England 12 11 23
Scotland 14 15 29
Ireland 7 5 12
Wales 0 5 5

OVERALL

  Men Women Overall
England 24 23 47
Scotland 28 29 57
Ireland 14 10 24
Wales 3 10 13

Huge thanks to the mass of experienced FVO members who made it all happen, especially Dawn Goddard as SHI Co-ord, Vicky Thornton for Individual planning and Andrew Llewellyn for Relay planning.

Next year the SHIs will be hosted by the NWOA (Lakes?) on 27th – 28th September 2025.

Nick Barrable
ENG SHI TM 2024