Races in April

April has seen a number of major races for juniors, starting with the snowy JK, a weekend in the Lakes and then summer at the Northern Champs.

Northern Champs Weekend report from Ffion J

On Saturday EBOR held a sprint race primarily for M/W16-M/W20 in York university. The area was technical and made you need to slow down and read your map to pick a route as there were many to chose from. The sprint was certainly different from any others before for example the jk, MOD Stafford which was just the case of running as fast as possible (and checking control codes). In York you had to make sure you were constantly looking at the map whilst running which made it easier for controls you were going to next.

Me and Scarlet brightened up the sunny day even more with our colourful knee tape.

On the Sunday the competition was held in Wass Forest, an area previously used for the jk in 2016. The area had many contour and craggy features. Making it hard to run up the hills. It was muddy and wet when trying to rock climb so it made things interesting. Route choices in the course were sensible until crawling through a thicket to get to the other side which took longer than expected. But overall Wass was a lovely place to run around even if you were extremely tired.

Ffion B also made the long journey to Wass

The trip to the Northern Champions was my first event at Wass forest. The area was really nice with a variety of features I don’t often see down in south east, two of my controls being at the bottom of cliff faces. It was a bit hilly and wet under foot and tons of small rocks that were easy to misplace under foot. The course was well made with the controls on different features and a mix of long and shorts legs, however there was only really one way to go to each control.

I had an earlier start time at 10:51 but had to arrive early due to the long 2km walk from the assembly to the start. However, it was worth the early start as I just managed to return before the rain began. Annoyingly I messed up on one control that added 10 mins to my overall time, this was due to a bad route choice that made me over run the control which could have been easily avoided. After this I tried to increase my pace for the other half of the course to regain some time.

Overall I had a really good time and really enjoyed the experience, especially the KFC on the 4 hour journey home.