Three Peaks Yacht Race
Kings of the Mountains
Rob Howard / 21.06.2012
After the fine early morning the weather deteriorated a little on Ben Nevis from mid-morning, with cloud covering the top of the mountain and temperatures dropping , but it didn’t deter the runners from ‘We Love MCR’.
Richard Mortiboys and Tim Austin, who have been quickest on both mountains so far set another fast time (3 hours 18 minutes), to secure their King of the Mountains title. They will most likely also get a clean sweep of the trophies for each peak as their time is well ahead of any other so far and unlikely to be beaten. (The total mountain aggregate time for the pair is 14 hours 51 minutes.)
As they crossed the line Tim Austin grabbed a can of already open beer and said, “Yes, there is a running god!” He seemed to have plenty of energy left and was bouncing around on the finish line, while his partner looked a bit more weary, opted for orange juice and said, “He’s ridiculously fit!”
The team finished in 8th just behind Team Thor, who were by far the youngest in the race. Their runners just wanted to get back ahead of MCR, which they did easily and the team were delighted with their 7th place. “We thought we’d blown it completely when we ran aground,” said Laura Blagden, the only female skipper in the race. “When we refloated we had the tide against us and we lost 9 hours, but at least we were not last and that was encouraging, then after that we got some good tide.” They managed to win back a few more places on the final sailing leg and are now waiting for more crew to arrive to help take the boat back to Southampton.
Beach Fox too seemed happy with their 6th place finish and the runners said they couldn’t have done any more to gain time. They even joked they’d been “elbowing walkers out of the way on the run down”. Sea Fever were just ahead of them in 5th place and Patrick Bird said his running partner on Ben Nevis, Mary Edgerton was “like a rocket going uphill”. This team all had a large glass of champagne on the finish line to celebrate their finish. (The boat was the winner of the Tilman Trophy 2 years ago, but hadn’t quite managed to repeat the win in a very competitive Tilman competition this year.) They have the shortest journey to their home port after the race as Sea Fever is sailed out of Ardfern, which is just south of Oban.
In 4th place were Stormwind and Sam and Alisdair Rose completed the mountain run for them. Sam said, “It was snowing on top! I much preferred the Snowdon run. I couldn’t get any pace going on the Ben Nevis track – the path is really tricky to run down.” They had overtaken Sea Fever on the run up the mountain to win a place and she said; “We passed them going up and were kamikaze coming down, so thought we were safe from being caught.”
Rho finished in 3rd overall, just missing out on the Tilman trophy after Quickstep got ahead of them in Loch Linnhe. Mark Wilsher said, “Coming up Loch Linnhe was a nightmare and we must have tacked 200 times, we were almost ready to give up.”
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