Training Log Archive: jennycas

Event: Australian WOC Trials
 

Had spent the morning watching the fog and worrying about whether the planeloads from Melbourne would actually make it (bit hard to hold trials without half the field) but by the time I started I had seen everyone but Reuben and I ran into him out on course, so that was okay. Lack of speedwork lately meant I didn't really have a sprint gear but I was running smoothly enough apart from a wobble on 5 where the singletrack through the hedge wasn't the optimal route, and then a shocker on 9, where, as I came round the building from the right, I thought "okay, I'll run that way as I leave" not realising that "that way" was at 90 degrees to the right way! So I went north not west, and couldn't work out where I was for over a minute. (Heard afterwards that Bridget and Wendy did the same thing, having come from the east also. People coming from the west didn't make that mistake!) I do enjoy a sprint which makes you think, and therefore I'm pleased that this was technical enough to force me into an error, if that makes any sense.

I went down with a good thump on the 'bridge' at 10, startling Susanne who was looking down below. No damage to me but scraped a a swathe of blankness across my map - luckily a section I'd already run through, but the print quality really was crap - and after that I was rather tentative, so fairly slow through the remaining buildings. Both Sus & I ran into the dead end at 11 because the ghosting around the number made it look like there was a gap in the fence (there actually was, which some people squeezed through, but it was in a diferent place - not a mapped gap and the fence was officially uncrossable).

Benbullen, Diddleum Plains. Lots of water flowing in the creeks and lots of marshes to squelch across. Lucky I don't mind getting my feet wet :) Took a little while to work out the first control, being momentarily distracted by the sound of Julian falling in a hole on the way to what was later my number 11. The course wasn't rocket science but you needed good bearings and the confidence that the control would really be where you thought it was, as some of them were incredibly well hidden (I remembered this from 2009). I heard quite a few comments afterwards along the lines of "there was something funny with the map" or "there was an unmapped gully" and although this didn't trouble me, I know what people were meaning - but I'd say that it was more in the cartography than the mapping, and that sometimes a kink in the contour was over or under-emphasised.

The drive via Scottsdale to St Helens afterwards, being both dark and winding, seemed to take forever.

2 - Splits

2 - Splits