A 600 mile weekend also brought a foot orienteering race at Formby Sands near Liverpool on Sunday following the MTBO in Devon of the Saturday.
Cath and I love sand dune events and Formby is probably our closest so we decided to take the trip north. Being a round of the Compass Sport Cup the event was well attended with a good atmosphere at the assembly area before a fairly long walk to the start overlooking footballers mansions, ugly new fake Victoriana brick piles with high walls and lots of security cameras.
With the final round of the MTBO World Cup a week later I started determined not to run flat out and to just enjoy the run, concentrate on the nav and not make any mistakes. To many times recently I have paid for a good running result with very sore legs for days later and I couldn’t afford to do that this time.
I started steadily getting good flow through the controls. I had a 10 second wobble on number 8 whilst I worked out the undergrowth marked on the map was in fact the world’s largest nettle patch and I really was not going to be running through any of it. Number 9 was a significant tree which didn’t seem obvious running in and I didn’t have an accurate enough line really but luckily I spotted the flag peeking out from behind a bush so didn’t lose any time. Then came my only mistake. Navigating perfectly to 11 I was distracted by 4 runners going into another control nearby and diverted to it assuming I was wrong and they were right. Shame they were off to another control and were on a different course. I went back to my original route in and nailed it but had lost about a minute, daft !
On the way to 15 I caught sight of Liam Corner in the distance (very handy on his mountain bike too but I have not actually managed to race against him yet). The red mist descended and I put the hammer down. I knew it was the wrong thing to do but I was enjoying myself. I got a better route into 15 avoiding the nettles punching just before him and then legged it. It took me a couple of controls to drop him but the effort put me in a daft position on the way to 18. Running along the vague track I had no idea how far I had come along it and was starting to think I was going to have a big mistake. Luckily after a wobble on an earlier track junction I realised where I was, picking up a contour on the track and had no trouble with it in the end but it was not a clever thing to do. I backed off a little and cruised through the last couple to the finish having had a great time.
I even happier when I saw the results – 5th, taking a few ‘famous’ scalps and only beaten by a handful of young elites.
results at http://www.meroc.co.uk/FormbyResults/FormbyCSCTResults/index.html
Holly, Cath and I then visited the National Trust reserve we had so recently run through, going down to the beach and looking for the Red Squirrels the area is famous for, but were disappointed to hear most of them had been wiped out by squirrel pox! Together with coastal erosion of 4m per year Formby Sands is an area really under pressure. More details at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-formby-2