Gone are the days of Easter meaning, for me at least, 4 days in church serving the Altar. Nowadays over the long bank holiday I worship the Orienteering Gods at The Jan Kjellstrom - aka the JK, British Orienteering's most prestigious event outside of the British Championships in the 4 separate foot-O disciplines of Sprint, Middle, Long and Relay. The JK contains all 4 of these, with the middle and classic times cmbined in an overall competition. There's little recovery time between the 4 hard races and at time crucifixion seems the easy way out.
This year we were treated to typical tough Scottish terrain and almost-typical Scottish weather in northern Perthshire. Thankfully the typical Scottish Midgies weren't on hand.
Anyway, the reason for this post - somewhere to host my quickrouted maps:
Friday's Sprint Race - Livingstone.
An enjoyable race around a fairly trick albeit NED-ish area. an OK result in 42ndish (50th last year) but there were some mistakes in there. I did 17:40, the course was taken out by Murray Strain in 14:37. Blimey.
Saturday's Middle Distance Race - Dunalastair.
I like the idea of middle distance courses but you don't get many of them about, and when I run them I'm generally crap. As this was a World Ranking Event GPS watches were not allowed, so not even I know what happened when it took me 14,5mins to find control #1, an entire 200m away from the start kite. After that some bits were OK but a lot was bad. Mainly because I was mad.
Sunday's Classic - Craig a Barns (Dunkeld).
This was meaty. 2hr 16min for 11.6km (600m climb) tells the story - I was out for a long time and flagged from about 70 minutes in (as expected due to lack of rougher training of late), losing a lot of concentration and impetus, and thus time. However, similar courses in the past have seen me out for over 150mins, so I'm moving in the right direction. I also managed to head up a group of 4 guys who clocked times within 9 seconds of each other - ridiculous over this amount of time. The Course was won by Douglas Tullie (OMM Elite 3rd place) just shy of 87mins. A class run.
Monday's Relays - Newtyle (Dunkeld).
My first relay run for my new Klub, CLOK, I ran the last leg on the big boy's course. I was out on my own for all of it as we were well adrift by the time I went out, so I didn't get the head-to-head experience I enjoy, but was just glad of the run. My cleanest of the weekend as well, although my 42ish mins was still 10mins shy of Oli Johnson on my specific course (although he was fighting for the medals so had something to run for).
The O tech is improving but still more practise needed, and I should get it over the next few months. Next up - Coledale Horseshoe, then the British Orienteering Champs, also in the lakes.
