Woodbury Common near Exeter, famous for its Royal Marine Commando training grounds, is quite a hike down from Staffordshire, but not so far from my roots in Taunton so I decided to take trip south for Devon’s first MTBO event.
The area is already famous locally for mountain biking and has some great trails.
Covering most of a piece of A3 at 1:15000, the area is a huge with a good path network criss-crossing a rolling landscape of open heathland and woods.
I had decided on a strategy of really attacking the climbs but to concentrate on technique and make as few mistakes as possible. I had to avoid several camouflaged, gun-carrying Marines on the way to number 1, and a couple of them seemed quite intimidated with me piling down the track towards them which seemed quite strange with them being the ones carrying the SA8Os!
The first few controls criss-crossed the same area a few times before a very fast descent off the heathland and into the forest where we had our first encounters with some of the commando course, calling for bike on shoulder climbing up slippery banks.
Unfortunately, a misplaced and a stolen control at this point interrupted my flow some what as I phaffed around, eventually finding one on an unmarked junction a bit further along, but the missing one seemed to have just disappeared. Some more climbs followed before we came back across the map for the sting in the tail to the last control. The route choice was a up and round or a short dash across a difficult to ride track. I felt even if I had to run with the bike the shorter route would be better, but how wrong I was!
The difficult to ride track was actually a part of the Marine Commando
challenge course. Battling through a muddy stream in a 6ft ditch, bike above my head, I opted to climb over the tunnel I came across as the bike wouldn’t fit. Eventually, I was faced with the exit and daylight above through a great big prickly gorse bush. I shoved the bike ahead of me, got it stuck and then head down just pushed my way through, dragging the bike after me.
I punched the last control and shouldered the bike up the steep climb towards the finish, where, after downloading, I pulled a big bit of gorse out of my helmet vents and my forehead!
Woodbury Common, although having a few too many bridleways to make course planning easy, is a great new addition to MTBO and other than the couple of misplaced controls I had a great time, with some really technical riding and route choices which made me think.
Thanks to Nigel Benham and Devon for their first foray into MTBO, lets hope QO and BOK can now follow in their footsteps to create a SW league with Wim, WSX and SARUM clubs.
note: although the results are now published they are a little misleading as indicated in the planners and organisers comments. I didn’t mispunch, just didn’t find a control that was in the wrong place as did most of the other mp’s except for two mechanical retirees mixed in ! Ive had a good peruse of the splits and was very pleased with most of the times, difficult to say how much time people lost on the controls in the wrong place/stolen but I think I had a lead of about 20 mins. A good day at the office !
http://www.orienteeringindevon.org.uk/devonoc/woodburyMTBO10.html
Friday will see a team of British riders arriving in Teolo, near Venice for the last rounds of this years IOF Mountain Bike Orienteering World Cup series.
days 4 and 5 of OO Cup 2010 were at the top of an enormous climb from the car park, but this tough ascent was rewarded by an assembly and finish area in a gorgeous alpine meadow, with stunning views and complete with cows (bells and all).
