Touring about ....first bit!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Touring about

 Dear Blog,

As promised, the article in several parts about Touring.. The instigation for organising the N.P.Aerospace Marathon Tour of Coventry and Warwickshire (copy of the original flyer on left) was to celebrate the centenary of the ‘first’ marathon to be run in England¹; but the inspiration came equally from the ‘Tours’ in which I have competed over the years.

Final stage of the N.P. Aerospace Tour of Coventry and Warwickshire.

Without wishing to become a latter-day Rambling Sid Rumbold, I thought a considered article on ‘Tours’ might be of some interest. Trudgers might consider the physical demands of a Tour to be a gentle introduction to Ultras? At a personal level, I always believed a Tour as a raison d’être for a camping holiday and a way of not having to structure useful training for a week or so.

What is a ‘Tour’ and how did they come about?

To classify as a Tour, three criteria may be considered.                                                                                                                                                        Firstly, the races which make up a Tour have to be run over a number of stages, not necessarily of the same length or same surface. Then the races should be held over a number of successive days, with perhaps one allowable brake of a day. ‘Series’ are excluded as most are scheduled over many weeks. And finally the winner(s) should to be determined by the cumulative time. (A Series decides its winners by totalling the finishing positions in the various contributory races.) 

        Obviously, relays are excluded; the likes of the present day Welsh Castles held over two days with many stages, and from the past, the London to Brighton. The very many road and cross country relays which take place annually would not be considered as they are one day affaires.         

      When the jogging boom took this country by storm in the early 80s, there was a mushrooming of marathon races. From half a dozen races annually, runners were spoilt for choice with more than one marathon on offer on most weekends. Many were promoted by charitable organisations with the singular purpose of raising money for their particular good cause. It has to be said that many were neither very well organised nor runner friendly and inevitably fell victim as the jogging craze cooled. They could con runners once or twice but the canny breed of new athlete soon learned that 26 miles need not to be sheer purgatory. Some marathons offered better value than others in terms of runner care and organisation; those races selfishly born (and borne) on the back of the boom folded very quickly.           

   Wirksworth Carnival Race, Tour of the Derwent Valley.

The ‘Fun Runners’ were soon to realise that marathons could not be run week after week without taking a heavy toll on their bodies; marathon running competitions declined markedly. Reflecting events in America, 10 kilometre races became the new vogue, offering some relief from the excessive pounding caused by the classic distance. Then in the late 80s and early 90s the half marathon increased in popularity as the 26 mile marathon went into further serious decline.

                               Tour of Tameside.

This change of focus was supplemented with a demand for variety from the tedium of road running; it came to be satisfied by a proliferation in off-road events of various kinds. Trail and fell running became the new fad for many athletes. Not that fell running was a new departure; for the aficionado, this was arguably the oldest branch of the sport, having its roots in the old guide races of the Lake District.

On the periphery of the road running resurgence towards the end of the twentieth century, all kinds of ‘extreme’ competitions were conceived appealing to minority interests, often gaining large amounts of publicity out of all proportion to the number of participants.

Fuelled by a desire for variety, it might be argued that the next fashion could perhaps be an increase in the awareness of the concept of ‘series cum grand prix’ competition. Not the established series-type of races which are spread over weeks or months and which are essentially just a string of normal competitive races linked together artificially by any number of spurious reasons, but rather a number of events taking place on consecutive days, either totally on the road or on a variety of surfaces. These ‘series’ usually take on the sobriquet of ‘Tour’, à la Tour de France, from which the idea germinated. The other essential difference between a ‘series’ and a ‘tour’ is the method employed in determining the outright winners; the former relies on totalling the place positions to determine the overall victor while the latter decides the result by calculating the cumulative time from all the stages.

              10 miles Tour of the Fylde.

Probably the first true ‘Tour’ of recent times was the Giro dell Umbria*, a brutal affaire staged in the central Italian province of Umbria from which the race gains its title: brutal because of the unremitting severity of each of the long hot road stages, six in seven days. The first edition of the Giro was in 1978, at a time when America had already seen the birth of the jogging boom but the rest of the world was just becoming aware of the concept. Each stage raced between two old cities in the Italian verdant countryside. Not for nothing was it part of what was referred to as ‘settimana verde’. Not that the competitors were usually in any state to appreciate the greenery; every stage started by plunging down from one hillside town, across the plains to invariably finish with a steep climb to the finish line in the central square of another town perched near, if not actually on, the summit of another nastily steep sided hill. No concession was given to recovery, the mileage of most stages being in double figures. It was a race for hard men (and women).

     St. Andrews beach run, Tour of Fife. The scene of Chariots of Fire film.

Modelled on the Tour de France, it had a leader’s yellow jersey and differing overall classifications; each day had its own prize structure, inevitably including several bottles of excellent wine, produced local to the particular stage!  For a number of years the Giro was abandoned but then in 2003, a much gentler affair was reborn with 5 shorter stages. The following year it had shrunk to the present day 4 stage competition, the longest measuring a mere 11 kilometres!

On his globe trotting racing programme, it probably was inevitable that one of the first non Italians to compete successfully in a Giro was former Commonwealth and European marathon champion, Olympian Ron Hill. Never one to miss out on a good commercial idea, he reinvented the concept in England, and the Tour of Tameside was born in the suburbs of Manchester in 1980. Ron’s masterstroke was to add variety to the stages while still keeping the concept intact, cleverly adding the novelty of completing a double marathon distance within the six racing days.

As opposed to the Italian version where competition took place only on a road surface over long hard stages, the Tour of Tameside incorporated, road, country, fell and canal path surfaces with a day of rest mid week, which like the Giro allowed a day for recovery (If you believe that actually happened then you must also believe in fairies!). However, it became a victim of its own success as the attitudes of the local authority and police hardened towards the inevitable traffic problems generated by the tour.

Colin   seethesoon