David Pentney, May 26th, 2010

This weekend saw running teams from Scott Logic compete in the 2010 Edinburgh Marathon Hairy Haggis Team Relay. This event is run along the same route and at the same time as the Edinburgh Marathon with the distance being split between runners in teams of four and running legs between 5 and 8 miles in distance.

Two Scott Logic teams were entered for the challenge in the Corporate Category, one from each of the principal development centres in Newcastle and Edinburgh. We had had mixed fortunes in training with some of our fastest runners picking up injuries at key points making them unable to compete on the day. Nevertheless as race day approached the anticipation and confidence grew and we knew that only a tropical heat wave or similarly scaled natural disaster could derail our search for ultimate glory and championship success.

Mother Nature duly obliged and for the second year in a row delivered race day temperatures in the mid to high twenties with the tarmac on the course more suited to grilling one’s lunch on than running. These conditions would surely favour the Edinburgh team who will have prepared and trained extensively for just such an eventuality and who also must have had a thorough measure of the lie of the land. This coupled with the fact that the Newcastle team had had to set off in the middle of the night to get to the race start and also had to navigate the unfamiliar race changeover locations would surely play into the hands of the home team. Indeed we decided that the logistics of the changeovers, including getting all personal belongings around the circuit before and after the race definitely qualified as a problem of NP class complexity.

Nevertheless it was the Edinburgh team which managed to send too many athletes to one changeover location, and (alas) too few to another, meaning that one runner would have to run on two legs (pun intended). Technically this meant that one of our runners had finished the race before it had started but the race officials were unlikely to see it that way and this would not guarantee us a winning time.

The race got off to a cracking start with Adrian Conlin handing over the baton for the Newcastle Team (technically a chip, but baton sounds better) in 53:50 minutes and 31st position in the overall classification. The Edinburgh team were not too far behind at this point with Mike Perrin completing in 1:08:02, a deficit which seemed surmountable at this stage.

Indeed the Edinburgh team clawed back just under two minutes on the second leg as Graham Odds completed in 42:40 whilst for the Newcastle team Simon Foley managed 44:35. The fact that Simon heads up our Edinburgh office yet was competing for the Newcastle team did not go unnoticed and would yet prove controversial in the post race analysis.

In the third leg it was once again the Edinburgh team who had the upper hand with a sterling performance by Colin McKean to finish in 1:05:12. Mark Rhodes for Newcastle managed 1:07:29. This section could be considered the mountain stage of the etape, containing as it did a monster 150 feet of total ascent without a water station in sight. On other courses this level of ascent would be considered a every minor undulation yet on the generally pancake flat Edinburgh Marathon route it constituted a major challenge and the relay runners had to weave their way through hordes of marathon runners who were tiring badly by this point.

By the fourth leg changeover it was clear that there could only be one winner, with Mike Porter for the Newcastle team taking over on fresh legs up against Graham Odds who due to the earlier logistical mix up would have to rerun his former leg in reverse, thereby constituting a net zero distance travelled. Graham still managed an excellent 41:17 against Mike’s 38:42. This brought the Newcastle team home in 55th position overall and 8th in the Corporate Category with a very respectable 3:24:35, and the Edinburgh team in 109th position overall, 15th in the Corporate Category in 3:37:09. The early leg advantage finally proved to be the narrow margin between the teams but the finishing positions of both teams were very respectable out of a total 837 teams competing in the relay.

Post race Mike Porter erroneously picked up a marathon runners medal and even posed with it for the official photographer. It will have to remain a mystery to subsequent generations as to how an athlete can complete the full 26.2 in such blistering conditions and yet have such a relaxed pose and beaming smile at the finish hardly having built up a sweat.

In the inevitable pub outing which followed it was decided that we will return in 2011 faster, fitter and stronger than ever and once again challenge for the glory that is the Edinburgh Marathon Hairy Haggis Relay. That promise, however, was for another day, as we turned our attention to roast dinner and real ale.