THE organiser of the Lake Vyrnwy half marathon says he hopes he has made the race founders proud after completing his first event as director.

Alan Lewis, from Adrenaline Sporting Events, oversaw his first half-marathon around the famous lake on Sunday with nearly 1,000 runners taking part in the special event.

Alan admitted he was determined to make the day work in memory of Doug Morris, a former Oswestry Olympians runner who founded the race in 1988,

He said: "We did it for Doug Morris, who started this race, and used to be part of Oswestry Olympians.

"When we heard that it wasn't going to go ahead, I thought there's now ay that can happen.

"I just hope that we made Doug proud, and we had such a great day.

"It was good to see so many local runners too, and it's great to see that we're seeing the same faces when we do the Welshpool 10k or the Oswestry 10k.

"It's a nice part of what we do and that people support us across the board."

Alan said he was happy with the logistics of the 2022 race, won by Sale Harrier runner Nigel Martin in a time of one hour, five minutes and 54 seconds, but admitted focus on the 2023 event is already underway.

He added: "We had just under 1,000 runners and we held a minute's silence for the Queen.

"We had a relatively new system with a park and ride as it was much easier, we think that it was much better and was a step up from previous years.

"We had all the runners brought in from a shuttle bus from about eight minutes away in Llanwddyn, so they all parked in the same place.

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"This meant they all dropped their bags off and then headed to the start line where we held the minute's silence for the Queen.

"The race was won by Nigel, who races for Sale Harriers and is a Great Britain runner, so the standard was really high, with lots of finishes just over an hour.

"But it was also good to see a flow of runners all running within three hours.

"Everyone was enjoying it and the community came out to support us too.

"We're already looking at how we can improve it for next year – it was an important learning curve for me as this was our first year of running it but it's been going for 31 years."