Lakes weekend review.
Originally, the JOK Chasing Sprint was going to take place the day after the National Event on Whitbarrow Scar. However, both these events were cancelled due to snow. Anyway, the Chasing Sprint was later rescheduled to take place on the day before the Graythwaite Regional event. It had been quite a while since I'd last been up to the Lake District, so I thought I would go this time now that entries for the Chasing Sprint had reopened.
I coped a lot better than I thought I would, especially since I don't often go orienteering in technical areas. In fact, I'm beginning to quite like areas with contour detail, like those of this last weekend, since there are always plenty of features. It's so much easier to veer off course when you're running through featureless forest, especially if there's a liberal smattering of brashings and thorny crap on the forest floor. Also, the forest floors in the Lakes were almost completely clear, which meant you really could run anywhere you wanted.
It's quite a drive to the Lakes - it took me about 5 and a half hours each way, stopping once on the way up and twice on the way down. But for two days of quality orienteering, it was well worth it. For added value, and since I drove myself there, and the weather was beautifully sunny, I decided to walk up
Gummer's How on Sunday, after the Graythwaite event. The views from there were spectacular, in particular, in
this photo I could look down over the forests I had run in earlier that weekend. Windermere is the wide lake in the foreground and Esthwaite Water is the smaller lake in the background. The forests were behind Windermere and to the left of Esthwaite.
Since the views were so nice, I really didn't want to leave Gummers How, but I knew I had to. A 5-and-a-half hour drive back to Oxford awaited....
Now that I've written up the weekend's orienteering, I've deleted the previous note I left. It was intended to only be there temporarily.