Brindley eyes higher ground

LINLITHGOW and East of Scotland Institute hill runner Tracey Brindley has claimed a place in the Scottish Team bound for next month’s World Championships in Alaska after winning the World Mountain Trophy trial in Alva.

Designed for sorting the toughest of Scottish athletes, the eight-and-a-half kilometre course began on graveled switch backs then climbed the stifling grass slopes of Ben Ever before reaching the turnaround point of Ben Cleuch, highest point in the Ochil Hills.

Some 45 minutes and 650 metres of gnarly climb and jarring descent later, the wiry 30-year-old crossed back over the airless start line almost four minutes up on her nearest rival.

In planning the route - created by Brindley’s boyfriend - no-one had envisaged the event coinciding with the year’s hottest day. Fortunately for her boyfriend, Brindley has "loved" hill running in all its guises from the time she first tried it in 1997.

"It was unbearably hot and I knew it was a tough climb so the main thing was to set off slow enough to actually make it around," said Brindley, after being carried to the nearest burn for a cool down.

"I train here a lot and it’s normally mist and rain. I’ve certainly never seen it like this before.

"I can normally go a lot faster in training but it was a matter of setting off and running within myself the whole way.

"Even so, by the finish I was in quite a bad way."

Brindley knows all about competing in the heat. In the 40 degrees of the 1999 European Championships in Bad Kleinkircheim she awoke on a drip having collapsed with heatstroke.

She describes it, with typical understatement, as a "bad experience".

Edinburgh’s Angela Mudge, winner of the 2000 World Championships in Bergen, has also been selected for Alaska along with Edinburgh’s Lyn Wilson, who emerged through the heat haze in second place in 49.12.

This means the Scottish women’s team will be made up entirely of Edinburgh-based Carnethy club athletes.

Brindley has been in five World Championships and has finished as high as tenth. In preparation for the altitude of Anchorage an injured hamstring has benefited from regular visits to the East of Scotland Institute’s physio. This week she anxiously awaits the results of her diet analysis. Then she heads for three weeks of training in the rarified air of St Moritz. And when she arrives in Alaska six weeks hence, she is not expecting the sauna-like conditions of the Ochils.

"It should be about 16 to 18 degrees. I like cold weather, so the colder the better for me."