I was very tired on the Sunday following organising the
Trailquest, but was determined to get a run on an area that although I know well I had never competed on. The day started with bright sunshine and a stiff wind, the later making life uncomfortable at sportident download which I had to set up before racing.
The map I knew was A3, 1:10,000 which was a bit of a tablecloth to carry and fold. I think we should have offered a 1:15,000 option on the Brown and Blue, something to think about for the next event.
As I walked to the start I wondered if I should have put on another layer, as I was just wearing a thin club short sleeve racing top, but decided I would soon warm up once I got started.
The course was good, with lots of turning and varying leg lengths, including one huge leg straight across the area. I made a couple of daft route choice errors towards the end of the course which lost me a couple of minutes but kept up the effort till the end, however with 5 controls to go the wind picked up, the sky went dark and it started to snow / hail. Even running hard I became extremely cold and wished that I had put that extra layer on and probably would have retired if I had been near the beginning of the course.
I finished and found a download tent in crisis as the main server had failed. It was entirely my fault as I had forgotten to plug it in to the power 🙁 Adrenaline took over and I got everything working again (thank goodness Autodownload uses a proper database so no results were lost) however I got even colder in the process and started shivering uncontrollably. I ended up in the car for the next 1/2 hour heaters on full trying to warm up. Lesson for the future listen to the weather forecast.
I was pleased with the result and for the first hour I was running well, although I spotted from routegadget that I lost quite a bit of time on #11 and #13 with my daft route choices. Results and Routegadget available here…
its all about stodge, bikes, MTBO and the outdoors