Brecon Fans Races

I noticed a few days ago that registering with a Google account was no longer working on this site. We use the Janrain social sign-in toolkit, and a little investigation showed this was all to do with the change from Google to Google+ accounts (some boring yada here). I think it works now, and we also enabled sign-in with Disqus and OpenID too (not that anyone knows their OpenID, but it's kinda geeky). read more

A few months back I restructured the Brecon Fans database to ensure we have one primary record for each runner, no matter how many times they have entered and run our races. This was harder than it might sound, as we had a) lots of runners with variations in their spellings and even dates of birth and it was hard to tell which variations were real, and b) we had lots of runners called Jones, Davies and Williams! Anyway, once done, I realised it should be simple to activate a link to each... read more

One of our competitors at Pen y Fan and Fan y Big last year - Damian Hall - is a journalist. He's had a piece about the races published in Men's Fitness magazine, and kindly sent us a link:

http://www.mensfitness.co.uk/races-events/4370/is-fell-running-britains-most-extreme-sport

To cut a very long story very short, I have fixed the searchable results page which has been broken for months! Apologies for the interruption. I use to keep the results in a separate Access database file that I could upload to the web server easily after the race, but the mechanism for reading this broke when my web hosts migrated onto 64-bit Windows Server 2012. On that operating system it is only possible to have either 32-bit or 64-bit Access database drivers, and it wasn't working out... read more

Last year a couple of people told me they had not been able to login and enter on-line because the web page was off-centre and the login controls were not accessible. Recently I managed to replicate this in Internet Explorer, and tonight I think I fixed it. If you were affected, please test and let me know if you have any problems.

Woohoo, it's Chris Chambers of Eastleigh Running Club going for the Pen y Fan and Fan y Big double.

First the good news... the online entry system is now open for 2015. It could be that perfect Christmas gift for the one you love!? Now the bad news... we've increased prices by £1 for each race, so that we can pay the farmers for parking out of the entry fees we receive. OK not such bad news really, as we collected money for parking anyway at Fan y Big, so including it in the entry fee will save that particular hassle. Overall, because there are more runners than cars, we will collect a little ... read more

Anthony Kay of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Loughborough University, has kindly sent us a copy of a paper he has recently had published: "Importance of descending skill for performance in fell races: a statistical analysis of race results”, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, vol. 10, pp. 173-181 (2014). He uses Pen y Fan as one of his case studies, because a) it’s a race with a very steep descent, and b) we have recorded split times for ascent and descent whenever... read more

Here are some photos I took at the finish, but it’s not quite all runners as I had to toddle off to do the results before everyone came in.

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A few snaps from the prize-giving earlier today; runners all full of cake and beer, and the rain holding off…

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