When I looked on Friday evening, 
the weather forecast for Sunday was horrendous: 29 mile per hour North East winds, sleet, hail and 2 degrees celsius. Winter boots and a gillet then….
I’d had a fairly hard week of training, particularly after perhaps a few too many squats at Chasers training on Tuesday night! I’d also had a big interval session on the turbo on Friday and 3 kids under 4 staying with us over the weekend, so I was not exactly in tip top condition for this, the first event of the National MBO league of 2010. The day dawned cold, but the predicted wind was nowhere to be felt as I queued up to start at Sherwood Pines.
Great for us MBO types was the inclusion of a 1:15,ooo map with 16 controls as well as the standard Dark and White 1:50,000 OS map with a further 13 controls. I decided even if it was detrimental to the rest of the event that I would really push it on the smaller scale map and get some MBO training in. I picked an OK route and rode cleanly, just getting confused by some rogue red and white tapes near to some of the controls, and chose to exit She
rwood Pines at the West Entrance after I had cleared it. In hindsight this was a mistake as the route out was a tortuous snake through a country park requiring very careful navigation. I also made the mistake of trying to cut through the housing estates of Clipstone, frustratingly not finding the route through (Killian Lomas also had the same problem). In the end I had to go right up to the roundabout, and looking at the GPS tracks lost about 4-6 minutes.
My route after than was sound, and other than a small mistake on the mad dash for home at number 20 which cost 45 seconds and another 30 secondss lost on the way to number 25 after crossing a road accidentally, I rode really well. To be honest, as I entered Clumber Park with only 35 minutes left I thought Id bitten off more than I could chew and had set myself up for another classic ‘Stodge back very late’ performance, but with the wind behind me and a real effort pulling out all the stops I ended up just over 5 minutes late back.
Results when I left for home showed 2nd in class and 3rd overall just behind Liam and Killian which I was very happy with. It was good to see how on an area that required more complex nav than normal that the three of us MBO specialists showed all the normal mountain bike whippets a clean pair of heels.
Good to see as well was another cracking performance for Great Britain Slalom Canoeist Campbell Walsh ( just back from a 6th place at the Oceania Open in Australia) in his first year of orienteering and adventure racing, luckily just behind me. Just don’t ask for a return match on the water at Nottingham, Mr Walsh……
Full results available at http://www.darkandwhite.co.uk/results-cross-country-fell-races.asp
Event Stats : 64km – 500m climb
he centre. After a scrappy start getting into the map scale (I had been riding on 1:15,000 for the previous two days mapping) and making a couple of daft errors I hoovered up the central controls so as to keep my options open at the end. I think perhaps I should have left #6 as the tracks were awful and it involved a stiff climb back out. A particular problem in this area is the horses and the way they churn up some of the tracks. They were everywhere, and I spent a couple of frustrating minutes getting past a particularly large group on a lane going to number 4. I was going to leave number 21 but decided at the last moment to blast up and get it, which lost me about 4 minutes, as I had to double back. My route then took me up on to the moor where I was treated by amazing views in all directions and fast riding with a small tail wind. After being worried I was biting off more that I could chew I started to cover the ground much more quickly and had lots of options on the way in to get the timing right.
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