We travelled to near Midhurst in Sussex this weekend for the British Orienteering Championships. I was running elite on the first day and had a fairly poor run to finish in 17th. I felt tired and unfocused, which was all down to poor pre-race preparation and a lack of sleep during the week. Petra, one of my Czech friends who travelled to the race with us, took some photos of the muddy assembly area and of some people finishing. The photo is of her boyfriend Petr coming in to win M21L. These are on our photo site.
The course was good, but quite lonely. I saw Heather Munro and Sarah Rollins out in the woods but they quickly overtook me and ran out of sight. The one part I really didn’t enjoy was just before the drinks point where we had a fairly short leg through some very thick forest. It was hard to run, I hadn’t seen anyone for a while and I was wondering why I was there.
The relay was far more fun. In fact, relays almost invariably are more fun than individual events. I was on second leg of Women’s Short with Jane Morgan and Mary Adams. Jane came back in the top 5 and I raced round my 2.8km to bring us back in the lead. We dropped down to 4th after the 3rd leg but still a good result.
I thoroughly enjoyed my course and really attacked it, which is what I should have been doing the day before. There were lots of people around and so lots of incentives to run fast and the short course meant that you had no excuse to walk up any hills!