Background
Now in its twenty-somethingth year, the ‘Winter Mondays’ series of road and trail races provide the perfect antidote to the commencement of the winter working week. The combination of regular on and off-road ‘chasing start’ races are an excellent way to gain or maintain fitness through the winter months, to add leg speed, and/or to gain more confidence in night-time navigation and racing. You’ll find a full listing of upcoming races at Winter Mondays – dates and races, with individual race details uploaded to the club calendar.
Off-road trail races use a variety of departure points to the west and north-west of the city; many of which will be familiar to members. There’s nothing especially difficult here in terms of navigation, although some sections of some routes may benefit from a daylight recce, and a fair amount of descriptive detail is included in the calendar entry for each race to assist the newbie, as well as links to individual race maps clearly showing the line and direction of travel. It’s also absolutely fine to run in pairs if you’d prefer some company.
Road races are run every third week from Bolsterstone Church or Low Bradfield. This year we’ll trial the option to run all road races in whichever direction you prefer.
Start times for both varieties of race are between 6pm and 6.30pm – typically the slow and more infirm from 6pm onwards, with the chasing pack leaving at regular intervals thereafter, and series whippets setting off around 6.30pm.
If all goes to plan, this should result in a more or less competitive chasing finish. There’s also a special dispensation for the over 70s, who are welcome to set off at any time that suits on the relevant Monday (please email your time to the RO by 9pm the same day).
Kit and safety
Trail races – full FRA kit must be carried as a minimum as well as a head torch, and a mobile phone in case of emergency and/or torch battery failure.
Road races – reflective vests and head torches must be worn. Please also carry a mobile phone in case of mishap.
Please sign yourself in before you set off, and add your self-recorded race time at the finish, using the R.O.’s shiny black clipboard (which you should find secured to the front/back of a slightly battered blue Skoda Roomster). Willy Kitchen, the R.O., will always wait at the finish until everyone who has signed in has returned safely, and he’s also happy to make a note of your mobile phone number, and an emergency contact number in case of mishap, if you’re willing to share this. If you were to go off-piste, on either trail or road race, you would certainly not be the first to have done so.
Carsharing
Please do keep an eye on announcements on the DP website, facebook page, and club WhatsApp groups – including a Winter/Summer Series group created for precisely this purpose. Willy will aim to publish individual race results (calculated as a % of the winner’s time) within 24-hours or so of each race, so you can all keep your eyes firmly fixed on the vagaries of race bonuses (awarded for bettering your preceding race result), and their impact upon the current series standings (using your best twelve results, including a maximum of four road races as counters).
Current/past series results
Previous years on Nicky Spinks’ web pages
The current series organiser intends when time allows, and in the spirit of largely pointless Dark Peak endeavour, to pull together a definitive set of ‘fastest known times’ for various of the age categories – watch this space.
History
Dave Tait, the original and inimitable ‘bit of a trod’ Carshare, is credited with the first incarnation of the Winter Mondays series, sometime in the early noughties, when they were all run on the roads – possibly in their very first format from Hunter’s Bar?
By the mid-noughties they’d moved to a regular spot from Bolsterstone Church to the north of the city, where they attracted regular stalwarts including Rus Beresford, Ian Winterburn, Darren Unwin, and a fair few friends from Penistone Footpath Runners. Nicky Spinks took over the organisation of the series in 2008, alternating road races one week on, one week off, with Keith Holmes’s decidedly fiendish hill rep sessions from the same venue – the source of much blood, sweat and cussin’ over the years. To the relief of many, these latter lapsed sometime around lockdown, when Nicky instead introduced a programme of trail races to keep us all active in a socially distanced kind of way.
Willy Kitchen picked up organisation of both winter and summer series from Nicky in autumn 2025, and is looking to gradually introduce a slightly wider range of venues to the west of the city to encourage as many members as possible to take advantage of these excellent winter sharpeners over the course of the series.