“Tiomila” became Fyramila at Stromlo West on Sunday May 6th as Abominable O-Men brought the latest version of the ACT Teams race to the assembled masses. Once run as a standard 3 person relay, the event has taken on several guises over the years.
This year saw almost 100 individuals enter the event and race in “teams” of 1, 2, 3 or 4 runners, over 4 different loops varying from 2.4km to 2.7km.
On the day, the weather gods were on the side of the organisers as an eventual 93 starters headed into the bush on varying bearings from the mass start. Some were seen creeping back near the start to eventually follow the correct route to their first control.
Course planner, Ian Prosser, was sufficiently impressed with the mass start format to venture that he might even do it again.
Fastest individual was Patrick Miller (recently selected in the Australian team for the Junior World Championships) 58:35, fastest pair Andrew Kerr and David Stocks 65:05, fastest triplet The Johnson family (Ellen, Andrew and Tenzing) 80:33 and the “awesomest foursome” Nic Plunkett-Cole, Ivy, Roy and Gareth Prosser 90:43.
The day also offered standard easy and very easy line courses. The easy course (though somewhat steep in places) was taken out by Elye Dent 19:14 followed by brother Hayden 32:52 and yet another brother Connor with a time of 54:38. Kerrie Cowan and family completed the very easy course in around 62 minutes.
Full Teams results are available here. Splits (of sorts) are available here We had to use CSV file to upload these Splits and for some reason Winsplits has not picked up all times for all legs. Results for the individual race are here.