O-a-blog™ (SAX, Mill Bank & Whitley)

Sunday, 2 March 2008

This was a great Saxons regional event, down near Sevenoaks. Lovely interesting running in a varied landscape. I ran in my correct age class this time and sadly came, er, last in my rather small category! Oops. Oh well.

My downfall was control 14 - I had trouble, to a ridiculous extent, finding this one despite having (I thought) navigated quite well on the way in. Seventeen minutes! I could not find that thing. Works wonders for your temper. And self-esteem. Tsk.

Do please have a look at the map extract here. I was on the track to the east of control 14, having gone pretty much due E from 13 down onto the track bend and thence to the junction. And yes I cut the corner off but this wasn't enough to disorientate me - or so I thought. Where it started to go wrong was when I couldn't see clearly the veg boundaries to my right, then left, along the track, and once I'd lost faith in that I suppose the rest of it just fell apart quite efficiently. I know that I spent a long time looking for the control too far south. One problem was that there seemed to be dozens of things that could have been that path leading west then south by the control, and I must have checked out most of them once I became unsure where I was. How to avoid a mess like this? I am not sure but I suppose that if I had had a really reliable pace-count it would have helped, though to be fair I thought I had - it just wasn't actually very good when put to the test!

Never mind: great courses, lovely place ... and there's always another week!