Training Log Archive: Spur

British Night Champs. Cademan & Thringstone near Leicester. M40. 32 controls. Really difficult 'middle distance' style area with numerous indistinct paths, and a map exchange. Lost a few mins at #2 missing one path then took an unnecessary up and over a hill to #3 but was clean to #8 and had only lost 2 mins to Peter Suba who was running close by. No idea what happened at #9 but totally lost my bearings close to the circle and lost 4 mins. A bit muddled by the map exchange after #12 that took you to a road then reversed back 180 degrees, but had a good solid loop after this and despite a couple of wobbles at #22 and #23 was in ok shape at #25 (after 93 mins) with about 1k to go, and in 8th place per the splits. Then disaster, my head-torch packed up. Spent a few mins faffing with cables with no joy, so resorted to small emergency hand torch, but very quickly utterly lost with low visibility. Thrashed around looking for other lights then eventually found the right #26. Considered retiring but with so much greenery en-route opted to take a safety bearing to the west then a long path to #27. Small torch started flickering at this point which was concerning. Some rather spooky features in the last loop, deep sided ponds/crags/viaduct/fight but managed to struggle round with lots of time loss, 10 mins before courses closed at 10pm. After all that, quite satisfied to actually finish but missed 10th by one minute! Disappointing. 12th/14.

C • Hope 1

Final Stag Dark Series at Drumpellier. Took it fairly steady and got back in plenty of time to receive a very large trophy!

Lethargic jog round Pollok Park in wind and rain working off last night's curry.