On a cold and damp Boxing Day morning when half the population stay under their quilts and the other half head off to DFS to buy a new sofa, 427 mad runners turned up at Chester Race Course for the annual 4.5 mile running of 'round the walls'. This consisted of a lap and a half of the race course before climbing up onto the walls and doing an entire lap of the city before dropping back onto the race course for what seemed like an endless lap - you could see the finish line, but didn't appear to get any nearer to it. Three hardened Wallasey runners with nothing else to do on Boxing Day turned up, first man home was Joe Johnson in a very respectable 28th position (26:41), followed by Arthur Wilson in 70th position (28:55) and Ken Hilton in 128th position (31:31). (KH)