OKEHAMPTON Running Club duo Claire Grubb and Claire Watkins took part in the Lighthouse Marathon on Saturday, November 9.

Dubbed Cornwall’s toughest marathon, the route provides almost 4,000ft of elevation- starting at Pendeen and finishing at Gwithian.

Both very strong runners, the women were initially running together until Claire G’s nasty tumble at mile ten, Claire W feeling awful for not realising she’d left her partner behind.

Claire G managed to get back up and carry on, not only completing the course after such a bad knock but finishing fourth lady and knocking 15 minutes off her efforts from last year. Claire Watkins was the third lady finishing. Watch times of 5 hours and 1 minutes for Claire Watkins and 5 hours and 31 minutes for Claire Grubb.

Elsewhere, Mags Jarvis ran in the third Simmons Park Parkrun, a first event for her since August 2023.

Mags has lived with Parkinson’s for over 12 years; one well-known symptom of the condition, Mags says, is “slowness” so Mags was rightfully delighted to get an age grading of 73.2%, better than her age grading for her Parkrun on a similar course 2 years ago.

Pearl Barnes and Keeley Phillips took part with their four-legged friends at the Purple Gecko’s Cardinham Woods event.

Pearl and her pooch finished the five-mile route in a time of 55 minutes and seven seconds with Keeley and her dog, Loki, coming in soon, after in one hour and two minutes. Well done runners and dogs!

Meanwhile, Ian Duffield, Lois Rowlands, Tom Poland, Nick, Molly and Sarah Marvin represented the club at local event the Drogo Ten. Organised by the South West Road Runners, the location of the event begins and ends at Castle Drogo.

Lois chose this run to be her first official ten-mile event, so it was a personal best for her, well done, Lois.

First ORC home was new member Ian Duffield with a time of one hour and 17 minutes. Tom Poland was next ORC to finish in one hour 27 minutes with George Hancock closely following three minutes later.

Mother and daughter Sarah and Molly Marvin finished up in one hour and 42 minutes with Nick Marvin rounding up the crew in two hours and 20 minutes with Lois Rowlands.

Finally, this weekend concluded the club’s Couch to 5km event.

Some runners opted to complete their 5km by taking part in the recently established Simmons Park Parkrun. Congratulations to Alison, Adele Mclean, Debbie Miller and Maxine Morley-Trapnell for completing the 5km distance. The crew were supported on the day by club coach Jo Baker-Teixeira.

Also completing it this weekend were Kirsty Loader, Richard Wright, Daniel Wayne and Deborah Cunningham.

Congratulations to all for the hard work and dedication to completing the programme- runners can now move towards the 10km distance.