Brown
(8.29km/105m)
57:23, 6.9mpk
1st/54 finishers.
Nice to win an event again! Also the first outing in my brand new SLOW top – a good omen? OUOC were out in force, mostly running Brown too, including the girls, so plenty of opportunity for comparison.
I ran with a GPS logger to record my route, see my article below – I’ve overlaid the track on the map. I am encouraged by how well it worked out, and will try it again for some races in the future.
Brown
(7.6k/130m)
52:30, 6.9mpk
3rd/26 finishers.
Pleased to have finished 3rd at this race. I was caught up by the person who finished second, about half way round. I took a different route to lose him and he got ahead, but I caught up at the very end. An interesting course, with some long cross-country legs followed by a quite technical section in a maze of paths and ditches, finishing with some hilly route-choice sections.
M21L
(12.2k/300m)
103:37, 8.5mpk
31st/38 finishers.
I was really aching from the Oxford City Race the previous day, which had really hurt my quads (running in O-shoes on tarmac for 10km, not a great idea) – or maybe it was just the hangover from the JOK Annual Dinner. Either way, this was not a good race for me. 21 minutes of mistakes, mainly in the middle section, killed off any chance of a good time, plus I hit a wall 2/3rds of the way around and had to walk for a bit. It’s a while since I got that way – but then, it’s a while since I’ve done a 12km course.
I was the last starter – but also the last finisher by quite a way. Thank goodness the catering was still going – it’s amazing how nice a hot dog with onions tastes after a 100 minute run.
I’m thinking that I really am more of a middle distance runner.
Open
(6.29k)
47:57, 7.6mpk
25th/82 finishers.
It was great to finally run in the Oxford City Race, years after it was originally conceived. It was a novelty to be sprinting down the middle of the streets and past historic buildings. I even deliberately went through The Turf pub – because I could! I defintely had a home advantage, useful on the long legs as you could pinpoint the control and then fold the map away and sprint. Despite this though, I made quite a few mistakes and poor route choice decisions. For the Men’s Open, the planner was trying to catch us out as often as possible, and succeeded in quite a few places.
Incidentally the shortest possible legal distance for the course was 9.4km, making my pace around 5mins/km, a bit more respectible for what was a sprint, albeit a long one.
At the Epping North event last Sunday, I ran with a GPS logging unit, for the first time. It logs my position every second, assuming it has a fix on at least four satellites. l Considering the device is not very sensitive, and I was wearing it at waist height, I am quite pleased with the results. The only section where the track didn’t come out well was the first part of leg 1 to 2.
It is difficult to line up the track with a scanned map, however the excellent RouteGadget software makes this easy for you – you mark known points on both the track and the map, and it does the rest. The result is not perfect, however if you look at my GPS track for the race, you can see both where I spiked the control and where I fumbled near the end – as well as my big mistake, which was the latter half of leg 1 to 2.
My GPS track for the 8.29km Brown course is here.
2: Big mistake here, I swung to the right, heading to Control 7. Despite realising this at the control, I was still unable to close in on Control 2, and overshot – you can see all of this on the track.
5: Confused by unmarked yaped path, went around the control.
12: Low visibility, turned back too early, thinking I had overshot.
16: I came off the path too early here – I lost reception here so you can’t see this on the track.
21: Swing too far to the north, corrected my mistake early on.
22: Overshot.
The others, as the track shows, were spikes. 🙂
I’m hoping to run again with the GPS unit. I’ve ordered a more sensitive unit, which I’ll be able to use with my mobile phone as the logger, in the new year once some bugs have beeen ironed out.
Despite the errors you can see on the track, I went on to (just) win the race. Full writeup of this event, and of the preceding events this month, including the Oxford City Race, to follow.