Background to Round Leicester Relay

The relay was first staged in 1989,starting from the old BUSM sports ground on Mowmacre Hill.

The idea for the race was dreamt up by three "geriatric has beens" (their words), like so many a good idea in one of their regular Friday night drinking sessions.

Ed Toft provided the organisational know-how, gleaned from his lifetime dedicated to running. Jim Smith provided the initial sponsorship through his then company BUSM and Dave Unwin was responsible for the routes and descriptions.

After much preparation, the race was staged for the first time on the May bank holiday Sunday in 1989.

The course roughly follows the footpath trail "the Leicester Round" though for logistical reasons follows road in many places that mirror the route. The course itself has changed for various reasons each year due to problems with land ownership and safety issues and continues to change "organically" to this day.

The race starts at Mowmacre Hill to the North West of the city then follows a huge circle roughly fourteen miles away from the city centre taking in some of the county's better known landmarks such as Burrough Hills Iron Age fort, Bosworth Battlefield, Bradgate Park and Beacon Hill. The total distance is somewhere around 92 miles.

The race originally was run all in one go, which meant gaps of sometimes several hours between runners on the course, with the last team finishing running through Bradgate woods in the dark at 9 o' clock at night!

To counteract this, and more importantly for safety reasons "restarts" were introduced. This enabled the race to stay together better and gave better competition to the runners who often in the past had run their whole leg without seeing another sole. The race was moved to August several years later to allow longer daylight hours and has remained there ever since.

The great fun of the day is that it is not always the fastest team that wins, many times over the years have we seen the lead change hands because someone has taken a wrong turning or failed to get a runner onto the start line at the right time!

2002 saw a record entry of 28 teams including an amazing 7 all ladies teams. Huncote were the winning team overall taking the lead from Leicester Coritanians on the last leg and winning by a margin of just 20seconds after some 9 hours of running!

Harborough won the Ladies event and OWLS won the mixed team event.