Abbey Runners maintains league based on results from fell races that our members take part in, in order to promote fell running within the club, encourage some friendly rivalry and competition, and more importantly, establish the club on the fell running scene!

Every year, we designate a number of fell races that count within the league. We nominate races in order to encourage Abbeys to attend the same races and to keep the competition as fair as possible. We also like to encourage as many new runners to give fell running a go, and be part of the league, so we include races that runners of all abilities have a chance to compete, and also include as many local fell races as possible.

Very briefly, you can do as many counting races as you like, and up to six will count towards your total score – from your best two ‘short’ races, best two ‘medium’ races and best two ‘long’ races. Prizes will be awarded in various categories.

Full rules and the counting races for 2012 can be found here
Links to details for all the counting races can be found here also.

The latest table (updated April 2012) can be found here

Archive League Results
2011 – found here
2010 – found here

General Fell Running Information
A great source of general fell running information is the FRA website – www.fellrunner.org.uk and the associated forum - http://forum.fellrunner.org.uk/
For Scotland, there is the Scottish Hill Racing website - http://www.scottishhillracing.co.uk/Home.aspx and the Welsh FRA website for Wales - http://www.wfra.me.uk/

Race Definitions
You will often see and hear fell races described as a system of letters – BS, AM, CL etc. This serves as a guide to the approximate difficult of the race in terms of its distance and climb, and is as follows:
There are 3 lengths of races as defined by the FRA, Short (“S”) – a race of 10km or less, Medium (“M”) – a race longer than 10km, but shorter than 20km and Long (“L”) – any race longer than 20km.
There are also 3 “categories” of fell race that indicate the potential difficulty in terms of the amount of climbing in the race. These are:
Category “A”     Averages at least 50m climb per km (i.e. in a race of 10km, there must be 500m vertical climb) & less than 20% of the race should be on road.
Category “B”     Averages at least 25m climb per km & less than 30% of the race should be on road.
Category “C”     Averages at least 20m climb per km, less than 40% of the race should be on road, and there should be some “genuine fell terrain”