O coach

It sounded like a good idea!

Posted on 04 Aug, 2008 by Lynne Walker | Filed under Blog • Mountains

Like most ideas I have, I think they sound great when I first propose them.

The problem comes if anyone else agrees with me at that stage and things are taken a step further – by which time I am usually not so sure about the original idea.

I received the notification about the Tay Long-O event on Sunday 3rd August in Glendevon. It sounded good “Terrain: mainly open, grassy hills with much lovely running.” Paul & I were trying to get fitter and so it seemed as if this could fit into our plans. There were three courses on offer: 10km, 15km and 20km. 10km and 420m climb was going to be enough for me; Paul was undecided but an email to the organiser, booking our coloured maps, solved this for him as he could decide on the actual day.

Running training had gone quite well with our two weeks in Hungary and week on Deeside. The forecast for the day was for mild, showery weather and little wind. This last bit was very evident when we arrived at the car park – lots of midges! We paid our £6 entry fee and received an A3 1:25000 Harveys map of Glendevon. After we had copied down the appropriate course (Paul decided to do the Medium course of 15km with 750m of climb), we got changed and decided that ‘bumbags’ with water, a cag and a bar would be sufficient for our course.

There was a punching start so I set off before Paul but he soon caught me on the ascent towards no. 1. It was quite tussocky and at one point I fell into a hidden stream and landed with my hands in a patch of nettles. Not a great start! Navigationally there were no problems as no. 1 was in a re-entrant beside a crag which could be seen from the start.

Control no.2 was a long leg and this is where I started to have some map reading problems. There were two saddles to cross through and I became mixed up as I thought I was further than I was and so was a little hesitant. Also Harvey maps have 15m contours – so slopes which looked reasonable on the map (as I was still treating it too like and orienteering map) were actually rather steep and long! I found no.2 easily though.

It still did not click with me on the way to no.3. I was reading the ground as if there were 5m contours and not expecting things to take so long to appear. I had a couple of ‘wobbles’ on the way to no.3, stopping too soon and not looking far enough ahead to see the landscape features. No.3 was very well located in a deep niche but I found it easily when I was in the correct valley!

After this things became better, even although it rained quite heavily for a short time. I was getting into the map reading and matching the ground up with the map. The course descended to the main valley and then went up the other side. The ground became less tussocky but I did not have enough energy to run very much. I had met Paul at the water station in the valley bottom and he was having a torrid time. One of his control descriptions had the wrong code. He was in the correct place, found the control but the code was wrong. He hunted about (turns out he searched over a 1km distance) but did not find anything else. Also his feet were very wet and he had bad blisters on the sole of each foot. He was going to do the last few controls of his course, but miss out the middle ones.

The end of the course took me some time and I was glad of the snack bar and water I had with me. I actually managed to run a bit near the finish as it was downhill!

Would I do a Long-O again? Yes, but no more than 10km.

On the way home we went to the last day of the Tiso sale in Glasgow (after partaking of a coffee and their amazing Florentine ‘things’) and picked up a few bargains.

Tagged : Blog • Mountains