We went over to the BADO district event at Chawton Forest Park this morning. Yesterday’s sunshine was still with us and it was a pleasure to be out in some of the more runnable bits of the forest. This was probably just as well as I didn’t have the best of runs on the Brown course. My legs felt tired, my cold still hasn’t gone away completely and I have failed to do anything about my ankle since the OMM. On top of this I wasted at least five minutes on just three of the controls.
When hitting a new three-strand barbed wire fence en-route to the fifth control it took me far too long to a) realise that it wasn’t going to be on the map and b) get over it! Next slip up was at number fourteen where I simply ran past the control wasting about a minute. Most annoying though was number eighteen where I bumped in to Christine and we both proceeded to spend at least three minutes looking for a depression which was less than 15 metres from the nearby clearing rather than the 50 shown on the map.
The 2002 map could do with an update and the planning was a little dubious in places. I often found myself dog-legging in to and out of controls and number six must only have existed to add an extra kilometre to the course. There was also a loop of seven or so controls on the Brown that Christine’s Blue course had in the opposite direction which can only have helped earlier runners when there were more people about (and something that I always thought was a big no-no when planning).
Perhaps I’m just bitter though: I ended up ten minutes down on Dave Rollins and, if I go on Tuesday night, I’ll not hear the end of being three seconds behind Peter Smith!
Dave,
while I haven’t checked your time I am guessing you did better than me (2 hours 7) so I don’t see that you have anything to complain about. As for the barbed wire fence that caused me to lose 20 minutes (not to mention the path over the earth wall just next to it that was also not on the map). So again I think I should be the one complaining.
I agree than the 5->6->7 leg was a bit of a waste. Looking at the map I would have thought they could have sent us right to the far side of the map from control 6 although the farmers might not of liked us running back through their fields.
Personally I ended up being about an hour behind Peter Smith — almost exactly the same split as last week (although we were both about 30 minutes slower).