British championships (2018-05-22)

Had been feeling better after EOC long for the last couple of days and was quietly confident about this race. Had really good legs on the day but one large early mistake ruined my chances.

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1-Planned to follow vegetation boundary, go over spur and drop into reentrant. Lost map contact completely halfway up vegetation boundary and had no idea where I was until I started descending and saw the reentrant. No time loss but not a good start.

5-Planned to climb above crag (easier running) and then contour to craggy spur and into control. Never saw an obvious spur, ended up too high looking for it. Came back and found myself on the spur, it was bounded by 'crags' with maybe a 30degree angle 1.01m high. I then took a bearing from what I thought was the southern end of the spur, but I was too high, the end of the spur was on an even smaller crag. In desperation I ran downhill towards the road to try to relocate, and found the crag with the corner. Took a bearing from here and ended up finding the control really quickly on a crag that seemed to be smaller than the actual control stake. I have tied my GPS route to the boulder at 4 and the crag to the south of 5. I believe that the control is 20-30m too low and that area was unfair to have a control in. 33 of 54 of the field lost significant time here.(+2.5mins)

10- Lost control over this spur (in a similar way to number 1) but focused purely on compass, confidence in my map reading ability extremely low. Hit quite a singletrack path after checking a couple of boulders in small reentrants and thought I was west of the control (90sec)

Rest of race went very well, had no problems interpreting the map and think I got the best routechoices.


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Gutted in the finish as I had great 2nd half speed, however lots of other potential competitors were also struck out due to early mistakes/accidents/tiredness. Also not spoken to a single person who didn't complain about the map in the SW hill. The best way to find number 5 was to run blindly on compass and accidentally lose height, then you found it straight away...