Orienteering race 1:08:55 [3] ** 7.3 km (9:26 / km) +360m 7:34 / km
spiked:9/16c shoes: New Balance RX Terrain
What with a National Event in the Lakes, there weren't many events on this weekend. I hadn't entered the Lakes event (which ended up being cancelled due to the snow), and so went to the Clent Hills district event instead.
I ran the Brown course, and compared to last weekend's Brown course at Shotover, it had 100m more distance and 100m more climb! It was a tough course, I was walking in quite a few places on the course. Having said that, I finished 10th out of 27, which I didn't think was too bad. The course was not particularly difficult technically, however as I said it was ridiculously hilly. To do well would require the strength to run up all the hills as well as good route choice to minimise unnecessary extra climb. I didn't do particularly well on either front!
One good way of summing up the area is 'plenty of contours, not much contour detail'. The forests were steep but reasonably runnable (as long as you weren't heading straight up!). There's a reasonable path network, which I was making reasonable use of.
The course used both Clent Hill and Walton Hill, but there's no easy way to get between the two hills. Out-of-bounds fields occupy most of the valley between the two hills, with controls 5-6 and 10-11-12 featuring long mandatory path-running sections. The same also applied to controls 14-15. In a way this is a little disappointing but there isn't a great deal the course planner could have done about it.
Still, it was nice to get out of Southern England for a change. It's not at every event you can say that control #9 was higher up than all of South East England....