Training Log Archive: Thraws

Lu's ankle hurt too much to run so we cycled up the hill to Goodwood and freewheeled back down. Southerly breeze meant I made it up on the middle ring.

This was my first experience of a city race and I was looking forward to it. I entered the men's open class, thinking it would be fairly straightforward, but hadn't bargained for the extent to which running hard and thinking hard at the same time take it out of you. I did enjoy it, but in spite of everything I've read about shoppers, tourists and so on not being a distraction I found the presence of so many 'normal' people immensely off-putting. I couldn't stop myself thinking how annoying I must be as I ran up behind small groups, brushed past children, or jumped out in front of cars to get round buggies and whatnot. Basically I felt like the sort of idiot that rides a bike on a pavement. This isn't as good as running through forests or over hills, but I'd do it again. As training.
After leaving the park we had a long uphill leg to 3, which didn't seem to me to offer any route choice, though I had some pointed out to me afterwards. As this was the start I just went for it. I haven't been able to fiind any route choice errors now I've had a chance to study the map at leisure, even where two close together controls required you to work out a devious way of linking them. But I lost 3 and a half minutes at 8, the fence-wall junction near the castle, and think it's worth analysing what went wrong. Sprint/urban races require mostly 'map to ground' running, so you think, for example, 'go round first building to left then round second building to right and look for second alley on left', and this was going fine. But there was so much detail in and near the circle at 8 I could visualise nothing, and I reverted to 'ground to map'. I could see a hill with helter-skelter sort of paths going up it and figured I needed those. So I passed the pond and turned left behind the wall. To be faced by a temporary plastic fence which looked designed to deter me. I can see now that the path, which would have been perfect, has a pink OOB screen on it which restricted access to the top of the hill to the north-east approach, but I couldn't see this at the time. I just thought, in haste, find another way. I ran right round the bottom of the hill (OK), having decided the upper parts of it were off limits and the control must be on one of the many lower walls. Then turned right at the crossing (not OK) and out the garden, along the wall (no control obs), through another gate, where I found a wall with a flag but the wrong code, and tried to relocate. The hill (and control) was clearly too far away by now so I just tried another path, which was blocked with a fence, then another, which just happened to be the one providing access to the castle. I suppose I should have stopped running when I lost map contact, and treated the leg as the maze it was.
I started to feel tired at 11 (after about 28 mins) and found planning ahead really difficult because of the need to fold the map. I was losing time by 22 because of doing one leg at a time (no exit strategy) and made tiny errors (another minute and a half) at 23, 24, 25 and 28. Finished about 10 mins behind the leader but in top half of field (fifth old man, I think). It was boiling hot.

In the end, it took me almost 3 hours to put all 22 controls out. I fretted over 86 and put it as high as I could, I double-checked 88, and I couldn't use n. side of 85 because of all the holly. I put 76 about 3 metres from where it should have been, but only the mapper noticed, and couldn't get 84, 74, 72 and 70 (yellow course path junctions) in the ground because it was so hard. The only complaint was with 71. It was on the veg boundary, but the map wasn't good here and I could probs have got away with using 72 here on the long green as I was only getting runners from one bit of forest to the other, anyway. In the end the times were quite long, but I had set out to provide as technical a challenge as possible, and people seem to have enjoyed it. Especially good to see runners on the yellow course, and appreciating it! I had no offers of help whatsoever, so ran round and collected five yellow controls once everyone was back, then ran out for ten northern ones while Les had to get the seven eastern ones as he needed to take them away. Took down signs about 9.15.
I've always wanted to plan courses using landform features on Slindon map and think I came up with some good ones. No one seemed to mind the bracken, or the fact they were out for over an hour, one little bit. And I can use OCAD now, as well.

To Bognor to collect ticket for Lucy's ballet on Friday.

Quick walk round control sites for Slindon to see how long it would take to put controls out on Thursday. Just over an hour, I should think.