There are days that you Scotland throws everything that is good about it at you, today was without doubt one of those!
The day started reasonably early, with the plan to get on the road to Aberfoyle at 7.45am ish! It was the first of the spring series of the Scottish Mountain Biking Orienteering championships. I looked at the temperature gauge falling as the miles passed and I made my way north. The skies were blue, the sun shining and nothing was on the roads. It was magnificent! I've not spent a huge amount of time in Aberfoyle but it's in a fantastic location. As I rolled into town I called my team mate Neil Smith who had already arrived and was setting up his bike.
I jumped out the car and set about finding a cafe that would sell me a cup of tea. The only place that was open was the butchers shop and bakers, only the candlestick maker was missing from the line up and they made a fine cup of tea. Neil was pretty much ready by the time I got back and I sorted out my bike, what to wear and drunk my tea. Neil is an ideal racing partner as he is always so well organised. I could almost turn up without a bike as I'm sure that Neil would have a spare! He is the map reader, route selector and generally the intelligence side of the team - not sure what I bring to the partnership but it seems to work well! Having said that I got involved in map reading and route selection and maybe that's were things went a bit Pete Tong!
We biked up the hill up to the start, registered, got our dibbers (the things that record you have been to the way points on the map) and I made another cup of tea! Things were running late and we had a few extra minutes to read the map of the area. We had bumped into Dave Frame, who we did the Rat Race with a few years ago and managed to finish 21st out of the 132 teams taking part. Dave knows his way around a course and is very fit despite complaining about his increasing years today.
The organiser shouted that the start was open and we dibbed in and grabbed the way marked map. This was our first mistake as we were rushing around and too keen to start! First race of the season and we made a few stupid mistakes and despite agreeing to treating the race a training ride it's hard to resist racing. So leaning against a fence and looking at the various scores for each of the points we planned our route. It was agreed, done and dusted! Or was it, at the last second we decided to do the top half of the course up in the Queen Elizabeth Forest - turned out to be a big mistake as we spent an hour climbing up through the steepest part of the course. I took a few pictures from the top looking back down into the valley below. It was a fantastic climb and to be honest we forgot about the race and enjoyed mountain biking on the sunny slopes.
When we're out invariably we believe the map must be wrong at some point during the race. That happened more than once today, mostly the maps are spot on but occasionally forest tracks are joined up and the maps are wrong.
When we completed the hilly section we set off to the fast flatter section of the course. Error number 2 was setting about the flatter section on the same route that we had originally planned. This took us round the perimeter of the course picking up the bigger scores for the least accessible points. The key to today's race was getting the most out of the map and careful planning - none of which we had done! There were lots of in and out way points as the forest tracks didn't easily link up and the better route would have been to go and race the flatter section of the course picking up as many of the in and out points within the 3 hour time limit. By the time we had spent an hour in the wrong forest and then starting on our perimeter strategy we were stuffed and quickly worked out there was no quick way to picking up any serious points. If we had gone into the flat section on a different route we'd have picked up a good few more points.
All up it was a stunning day, the biking was brilliant fun and despite our poor route selection it was only a training day and we will learn from the experience.
I'm hoping that we have seen the worst of the weather. Most of my training since the last blog has been on the treadmill, in the pool or on the spin bike and I am champing at the bit to get outside. Normally by this time I have done much more work on the road but the cold and snow has really put me off.
Next week we have a 5 hour adventure race so hopefully our map reading will be a little better.
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