Dragon's Back Race stage maps and cutoffs

Entries for 2027 are open. The full race costs £2,095, with a £400 deposit and then monthly payments. If you raise at least £3,000 for Parkinson's UK or CALM, the entry is half price. There's no qualifying race: you accept a participant declaration, and you must be over 20.

Besides the full race there are three ways in. The Hatchling costs the same as the full race. You run the first or second half of each day, in any mix you like, and you can switch to it at any point, including after missing a cutoff. Dragon's Fire (6 and 7 September, £599) is days one and two. Dragon's Tail (10 and 11 September, £399) is days five and six from Llandovery.

Registration is on Sunday 5 September, 13:00 to 17:00, at Ysgol Porth Y Felin in Conwy, with a compulsory briefing at 17:30. If you miss the briefing, you can't start. Conwy has a station on the North Wales Coast Line and is about an hour and a half by car from Manchester and Liverpool airports. You can leave a car for the week at Morfa Bach car park, which may charge.

A coach leaves Cardiff for Conwy at 10:00 on registration day, and another leaves Cardiff at 09:00 the morning after the finish, reaching Conwy around 13:30. Both are paid extras, booked ahead, and so is a transfer bag sent from Conwy to Cardiff. Book your own beds in Conwy before the start and in Cardiff after the finish.

You sleep in eight-person tents each night, in camps the organizer calls very basic (think a farmer's field), with portable toilets and no showers. Bring your own sleeping bag and mat. Everything for the week goes in one Ortlieb 59 L dry bag (the limit is 15 kg), which the team moves to each camp. A 10 L resupply bag of up to 2.5 kg waits at each day's aid station.

There is no crewing. Supporters can't run with you, carry anything or hand you food, and they can't enter the camps, aid stations or water points. They can see you off at Conwy Castle and meet you at the finish in Cardiff. During the race they can follow the live GPS tracking and send Dragon Mail, which you pick up at camp in the evening. You can buy food at shops and cafés on the route, as long as anyone else could buy the same thing.

Expect mild, wet weather. Capel Curig in Snowdonia averages a September high of 16.0°C and a low of 9.4°C, with 206 mm of rain over about 16 days. The organizer warns that if it rains several days running, everything in camp gets damp, so a spare set of waterproofs for the evenings is worth the weight.

The kit you carry every day includes waterproof jacket and trousers, a survival bag, a synthetic warm layer of at least 300 g, a baseplate compass, a headtorch, a red rear light, bottles or a bladder that hold 1.5 L, and a phone. The race gives you a GPS tracker and a map. In very cold or wet weather it can add a second hooded warm layer, waterproof gloves, a warm hat and full-length tights; in hot weather, a sun hat and another litre of water capacity. It tells you at registration or in camp.