Shelter Stone provides medical and rescue services to Arc of Attrition by UTMB

Shelter Stone was formed in 2024 to provide professional medical and rescue services to event organisers, and a strong team recently kept participants safe at our first event of 2025 - the Arc of Attrition organised by UTMB UK.

The Arc of Attrition is a challenging race for participants, with equally challenging logistics for the event team. It is a continuous running race around the South West coast path in Cornwall, with participants taking up to 36 hours, across 100, 50 and 25 mile options, with 3 different start points, 9 intermediate aid stations and a busy finish site. Nearly 1600 participants took park this year, which was a significant increase on previous years.

As ever we worked closely with the event organisers to agree on the requirements and optimal cover across the event. Our team comprised response teams, a blue light ambulance, aid station medics, finish line doctors, a medical director, and an incident controller in race control.

The South West Coast Path is already more challenging than you might imagine, with many steep ups and downs, in places uneven underfoot, and sometimes very close to the cliff edge. This, in combination with running through the night and in the tailend of Storm Éowyn, made for challenging conditions for participants. There were a consequently high number of trips and slips to keep our teams busy, as well as some more serious and a few unusual incidents.

Overall, especially given the conditions, Arc of Attrition was very successful for UTMB UK, supported by the professional medical and rescue services from our Shelter Stone team. We look forward to working with UTMB UK again at the Ultra-Trail Snowdonia race in May this year.

If you are interested in getting the very best professional medical and rescue services for your event, check out our Services and don’t hesitate to Get in Touch. If you are a suitably experience response team member or healthcare professional and interested in what we do, see how you can Work for Us.

Two of our response team members ready for deployment outside an aid station

More response team members working through the night to keep runners safe