Owls Count

Wow. A fantastic event yesterday. The City Race took place in Warwick and included a trip round the castle. Simon E. has posted the GPS from his run, which gives a good indication of the course. There were a 43 controls in the 7.1km, which meant you really had to concentrate the whole way round and keep a careful track of where you were.

The first two controls were close by - viewable by everyone standing around the start area. From there it was out of the park and through the town. My first problem came at number 8 - I was distracted by trying not to get run down while crossing a road and lost twenty seconds looking for the park entrance on the wrong side of the police station. I was slightly slow to 9. At 10 I made my first ‘wrong side of a wall’ mistake. Not a big one here, as I noticed the problem before I had gone too far, but I still lost 50 seconds in the car park.

Going out of 12 I lost concentration and started off down the wrong road. I quickly noticed and corrected my route - choosing to go via 20 rather than doubling back. Thirty seconds lost from the slightly longer route. Going out of 13 I did not notice which side of the wall 14 was on and lost a minute being a metre away from the control but having to run all the way round.

From there it was onto the car park for the castle. I was struggling to relate the map and ground at this stage and lost twenty seconds going to 17 just by not running quickly enough. We then looped back round the near part of the town before entering the castle for some butterfly loops. I was fine for the first loop, running well through the castle and up and down the moat.

However, I then turned to the second part of the map and made a stupid mistake. The last control on part I was 26 and on turning the map over I headed off and spiked 29. On arriving I looked at the control descriptions and realised the mistake, but I had lost over a minute. Getting back to the common butterfly control, for the final loop, was quick. Then I made my biggest mistake.

On starting to go to 31 I just could not work out where I wanted to be. I lost three minutes trying to sort out where I wanted to go. At least part of the problem was I had the map the wrong way up at one stage, but it took a while for me to just stop for a moment and actually concentrate on where I needed to run. By this stage I was tired - both physically and mentally. On the long legs back to the park I lost a little bit of time. I managed to keep my concentration across the park and not make any mistakes, before collapsing over the finish line.

Overall a very good, enjoyable, and challenging race. I finished in just over 65 minutes, but, mistake free, I would have been close to 55 and feel I should have beaten 60 minutes. The good news, for me, was that my recent training seemed to be useful - I felt that I was running more smoothly than I have been for a while.