13th June 2026 – RACE REPORT BY NARNI
Do you like livestock? Do you love to be surrounded by hoards of large and intimidating cattle? Step right this way, as yours truly had to navigate a good 20 of the aforementioned beasts in the otherwise incident-free and bucolic drive up to Hardwick Hall, home of Rasselbock Running’s “Hardwick Hobble”. Despite failing to comply with the helpful suggestions from fellow athletes similarly waylaid of “just rev your engine” (I have no engine, thanks) and “let’s offer them some grass” (there’s a whole field of if here pal), I managed to just about keep my wing-mirrors intact and made it to the start line with 5 minutes to spare, having rung ahead to the race director and told them I’d been held up by cows. Arriving somewhat flustered I announced my presence at the registration deck by confidently stating “it’s Fulford, I’m one of the cows” instead of “it’s Fulford, I rang about the cows”. Great. Amy spotted, photos snapped, we were off reasonably promptly at 9.05.
Amy was a sweetheart enough to keep me company for the first lap, and we nattered our way around the route with many remarks of ‘what elevation was this supposed to be’ and mutters of ‘bit chuffing hilly this’ as we sailed across a rather pretty 5.6km lapped course. It became very quickly apparent why the series was called the ‘hobble’; sections of the trail had been churned up by farm traffic tyres and then hardened in the the sun; combined with rabbit warrens galore and the very nature of it being a trail race it was an exercise in how to avoid breaking your ankles. I felt really pleased at being able to coax myself up the hills with a combination of stubborn determination on the shallow and moderate ones and mental bargaining / jeffing with the steep ones. I even managed to overtake a few folk on the hilly sections, which is something I’ve never been able to do and I’m genuinely really chuffed with. Amy and I settled into a rhythm of me losing time due to stuffing my face with watermelon / having a million wees / generally chatting with random people at race HQ and then having to catch her back up on each lap: our combination of consistent solid pace from her on the one hand and ‘muck around then have to peg it’ from me worked well for both of us.
On my 5th lap I threw a paddy and decided that it was a crying shame that I’d run all this way and not had the chance to pretend to be the heroine in a Jane Austen novel by mooning around the gardens of the stately home, and decided to abandon the race proper at 5 laps in favour of a final cool down few km in the house grounds. I rang the finishers bell, stuffed my race number in my hydration vest and made a bee-line for the main house. £23.50 for entry to the grounds (sickening), but some heavy flirting with the National Trust guy on the gate saw that financial hurdle swiftly negated. I snapped a quick pic of the house and then ran a delightful 2k cooldown pretending to be Elizabeth Bennet before heading back to the car and exiting via the south gate, away from the direction of any cattle and with my wing mirrors intact.
If you like elevation that’s still achievable, a pretty view, a stately home and cows, then the Hardwick Hobble one is the one for you.
