Dumyat is not the steepest hill, nor the
highest, nor even the most scenic, but it’ll always hold a special place in the
hill running calendar for me. Dumyat, which overlooks the University of
Stirling campus at the westernmost end of the Ochils, was the first hill I ever
ran up. The first time I visited my partner in Stirling, where she was
finishing her PhD, she pointed out this hill and said that folk used to run up
it at lunchtime. Madness, I thought. Nevertheless, up we went one evening, and
although we didn’t keep running all the way up, I was enjoying the descent
until I slipped on a wet wooden bridge and fell on my backside: it turns out my
Nikes weren’t going to cut it. But my goodness, it was fun. A few months later
I moved to Stirling myself, bought some Inov-8s, and Dumyat became a
semi-regular lunchtime run. I became one of those people that colleagues shook
their heads pityingly at when I returned to the office muddied and sweaty.
I haven’t run Dumyat since I moved to
Peebles almost a year ago, so how could I resist doing the race for the first
time since 2016? The drive up from work didn’t fill me with optimism – rain
lashed at the windscreen and the thermometer read 5 degrees – but by the start
the rain had abated and like many people I was feeling happy enough to run in a
vest, which for the first time was blue and red! Having learned my lesson from
previous years that there was a risk of a severe risk of a bottleneck at the
start, I probably went off too hard, but it meant things weren’t too congested
as we slogged up the hill. The additional of a proper, hard-packed path to parts
of the hill has possibly made route choices easier, although it did take away
some of the fun of the descent, and put folk still on their way up of severe
risk of being bowled over by a flying descender.
It’s a great run. The gradient is such
that it’s very runnable most of the way up and absolutely fantastic to descend.
I’d set myself a target of 40 minutes – with a previous PB of just over 42 set
in 2016 before I joined the Ochil Hill Runners – and although I ended up with a
slightly frustrating 40:01 I felt I’d had a pretty good run of it. That was
good enough for 36th out of 360 runners, but still over 7 minutes
slower than the winner, Sasha Chepelin, who has already won a hatful of races
this year. Last time I did the race it was a fiver; this year it was £12, which
got you a not-very-good t-shirt and some disgusting stovies back at the finish.
The University seems to have decided that if there aren’t t-shirts, a sound
system and an inflatable arch to mark the finish it just isn’t an ‘event’. Four
years of hill racing and it seems I’m already turning into a grumpy old sod.
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