Welsh Castles relay qualification 2027

We will be submitting 3 teams this year. Open, Women and Vets (women 35+ and men 40+). Note: The Vets team is split 50/50 men/women (as per WCR regulations). You must be a first claim affiliated member to run in the relays.

Key dates:

Start of qualifying: 1st Jan 2027

Last date to sign up: 31st March 2027

Last date to qualify: Sunday 25th April 2027

Parkrun /5k qualification: Submitting this form will add you to the leader board for team selection. The qualifying window will run from 1st January to 25th April and your parkrun times will be taken from parkrun's website to populate the leader board. You can also do either a 5k or 10k race (including Wythenshawe Community Run on a Sunday) - for 5k we will just take your finishing time, for 10k we will take half of your finishing time.

New open & women's team qualifier trial: This year we will be trialling a new (additional) way to qualify for the Open & Women's teams - SEE QUESTION 1 FOR ALL DETAILS BELOW. The parkrun qualifier will still be active for all other places and for all places in the vets team. Given WCR stages are around 10 miles, the hope is that we can field the most competitive open team if lots of people have completed a recent HM/mara training block. This is a trial, if it goes well we may look at using it again and could expand it to the vets team.

In the event that more than 20 runners auto-qualify, the marathon times will be converted to half marathon times using Pete Riegel’s race equivalency formula, and the auto-qualifiers will be ranked.

Team prioritisation: This year we will be prioritising the women's team by putting the fastest 20 absolute women's times into the team  (including the auto-qualifiers). We will then be putting the fastest 20 men into the open team (including the auto-qualifiers). To keep things fair after last year, this years vets team will be selected based on absolute times rather than age grade, to try and capture those who missed out on all 3 teams last year.

Please note: Signing up is not a commitment to run, you can drop out at a later date if required. Once the sign up window closes on 31st March any sign ups will go to the bottom of the leader board and only called up when everyone else has been considered.