Two Breweries Hill Race

The 25th running of the Two Breweries saw an impressive win for Bog & Burn Champion Alasdair Anthony, not normally renowned for tackling the longer hill races.

I did my usual leading out of the field for the first half mile or so, before letting the real leaders take over. I have never seen such chaos on the initial climb Grieston Hill with runners scattering in all directions. The organisers really should flag a proper route up this hill with an intial checkpoint at the summit of Grieston Hill. This would prevent the Moorfoot runners from cheating and flagrantly dis-obeying the instructions at the start by cutting across fields that are out of bounds.

It would also help if there was a flagged descent off Birkscairn Hill, but I guess that isn’t in the ethos of the race. Somehow this year I took my worst ever line off Birkscairn, and ended up fighting through far more heather and marsh than normal and ending up at Glensax completely exhausted, having lost about 10 places. I more or less gave up at this point and relaxed into the climb up Hundleshope, not bothering to really chase anyone down.

Bit by bit as the race went on I started to feel better, and by the time I reached the long forest track after Stobo I was having a full-blown second wind, and managed to pass a few runners and chase down Mark Johnston, who I caught at the summit of Trahenna. Mark promptly flew away from me on the descent, but I was pleased to jog down to the finish in 3:10:20 without dropping any more places.

12 Westies completed the race:

10, Manuel Gorman 3:01:13

11, David Riach 3:02:18

20, Chris Upson 3:10:20

49, Don Reid 3:35:06

53, John Donnelly 3:37:09

94, Keith Adams 4:04:35

111, Catriona Miller 4:12:29

120, Ellen Homewood 4:17:54

132, Elspeth Scott 4:26:18

138, John Hamer 4:29:56

172, Brenda Paul 4:59:58

174, Amy Pitch 5:00:00

Full results

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