Harwell Fun Run Records

The Harwell Fun Run has been going since the 1970s. We have some results on paper from 1977 but no formal records from before 1988.

Jump to Bomb Dump Courses | Diamond Courses | PHE Courses (current)

Since September 2016 - Health Protection Agency

Since September 2016 we have been starting and finishing outside the Health Protection Agency (formerly Public Health England). This puts us closer to the majority of the people on the site, and also keeps to areas that are not currently scheduled for building. The different courses are set up as Strava segments, which means that the records are logged automatically for anyone who uses Strava and are not tabulated below. You don't need a fancy GPS watch (although one will give you a more accurate trace); Strava works just fine as a free app on a phone.

• Leaderboard for the Normal Course (7.1 km = 4.4 mi)
• Leaderboard for the Short Course (5.0 km = 3.1 mi)
• Leaderboard for the Mini Course (3.3 km = 2.1 mi)

2006 to 2016 - heading for Diamond

Preparations in 2006 for the new housing estate forced a radical re-think of the traditional route, resulting in a route that we hoped (in vain!) would avoid any further building work. Starting south-westwards from the rugby pavilion, we joined an old runway north of where the E6 Building now stands, headed west to Eighth Street and then ran down the east side of the drainage pond, heading for Chilton School. The return trip used essentially the same route.

Yet more building work put paid to that route so we moved the start to the western end of Building 329, initially retaining the route down the east side of the pond but changing to this route (Google map link) when the ESA building was constructed.

These various 'Diamond' courses, which have been used since January 2006, were carefully measured to have the same length and all have a single set of records, listed below. (Awaiting update to include Sep 2010 - Apr 2016.)

Up to 2005 - the Bomb Dump

Normal course, 1988-2005, Short Course 2000-2005,
Mini Course, 2000-2005

Normal, Short and Mini courses, 2005-06

We used to start and finish at the pavilion on the main sports field. This involved starting (and sprint-finishing!) across the main gate. To improve safety, at the relaunch in 1988 we moved the start to the rugby pavilion, trimming about 300m off the distance. At that time the landfill site in the old railway cutting hadn't yet opened and we crossed the field by Prospect Farm on a muddy footpath rather than on a good track. The return leg skirted the 'Bumb Dump' (Southern Storage Area): up the long straight road towards Upper Farm, then round the old runways. From the top of the footbridge the quicker runners could see a long string of targets ahead: the challenge was to catch them.

The Short Course, then new, was a modified version of the normal course, run in reverse. It cut out the Bomb Dump loop and also by-passed Prospect Farm, using a different muddy footpath just east of Chilton village. We ran this uphill, and the key to a good time was controlling your effort on the climb so that you still had some leg-strength to exploit the downhill back to the village.

In 1999 we introduced the mini course: just two miles, down to the school and back. Shortly afterwards we realised that it was more fun to have the last part of the Short Course coinciding with the normal course. A much bigger short-cut up Chilton High Street saved enough distance to add the Bomb Dump, so the runners on the short and normal courses joined battle at the church.

By 2005 the site management had fenced off the runway at the SW corner of the Bomb Dump, forcing us to use a rougher route around the north side of the school and removing the spectacle of all the returning runners on the Bomb Dump straight. The records weren't segregated though: the tables below list the records for the normal course, the mini course, and the old and 'new' versions of the short course.