March 11 2026
Promoting Athletics in Orkney
COMPETITIONS & RUNS
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| Kirkwall Half Marathon 1 | May 31, 2026 | READ MORE |
| OARC Club Championships | June 28, 2026 | READ MORE |
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OARC AGM set for Monday 16th March
February 18 2026
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Orkney Junior Inter-County bingo is tomorrow night at the Legion: please come along and support fundraising for the JIC teams. I hear many of our finest bakers (and sandwich makers) have been hard at work ensuring there's plenty of good stuff available!
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North District Championships - 16th/17th May
This weekend a large OARC contingent will be making their way to the Scottish Athletics North District Championships held in Aberdeen. We have I think 35 athletes, 6 coaches, 1 official and 6 parents attending the competition, most traveling with the club trip on the Friday night but some making their own way to or from Aberdeen.
It's fantastic to see so many traveling, particularly those who are traveling to a competition for the first time: we have two U12s (I think our first taste of the Super Teams format), twelve U14 athletes and ten U16 athletes competing in the Championships, as well as ten U18+ athletes competing as guests in various events over the weekend.
Putting together any club trip is an enormous amount of work and I must thank Lorna Kemp for the huge amount of work she has put in on getting the logistics and planning of the trip right, and also thank all the coaches and parents traveling with the team to support us.
Last, but by no means least, we are incredibly grateful to the enormously generous sponsorship of Erlend and Diane from Advisory, who have helped make this trip significantly more affordable for those traveling. We're also very thankful to NorthLink Ferries for sponsoring the team with discounted travel - and finding some last minute cabins to help the team be their absolute best on Saturday morning in Aberdeen.
I hope everyone attending has a fantastic time and does themselves and Orkney proud. We'll be looking forward to seeing how you get on!
Event start lists and scoring will be at data.opentrack.run/en-gb/x/2026/GBR/endtf/
Congratulations to Annabel Simpson for both her win at the Lindsay's Scottish 10k and her excellent fashion taste!
Well done also to Erika Marwick who also ran in the race, and to Elsie Hutchison, Lillie Giggle-Bain and Abi Coltherd who competed at the Linwood Season Opener over the weekend. No longer report this week, sorry - but there's a bumper edition coming this weekend!
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Look who's back in the Scotland vest Taylah Paterson! Congratulations.
Congratulations also to Tony Wesley of the Western Isles who competed in Orkney 2025 and our open graded competition last year in the build up.
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After three events in three weeks to open the season, I have an update to the Senior Athlete participation league: this is a competition we run every year for our senior athletes, with points scored in competition against your past self - for completing races, PBs and improvements on previous years. At the end of the year, there's a lovely trophy to win as well.
After three events, Mervyn Hourston is out in front with three races completed, two PBs, a SB and an improvement on a previous year. 2024 winner Mark Flett is second, with Rosemary Donaldson third ahead of a strong group on 8 points.
As ever, I do my best to collect PBs from Strava and the like but I will have missed things, so please do let us know if I've missed a PB or otherwise made an error and I'll correct the record.
Scoring and details are here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DrSdOCLAfWMtEozjQucMXeDOy9pctijof68071BCQrw/edit?gid=0#gid=0
The next chance to score points will be the OTE Kirkwall Half Marathon at the end of the month, for which entries are open now:
www.entrycentral.com/kirkwall
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As well as providing regular athletic instruction and training sessions, one of the key aims of OARC is to promote pathways to performance and as part of this, the Club organises and participates in a range of home and away competitions throughout the year.