Long Mynd Valleys Race

Well it has been a busy weekend, dry tooling Friday night and Saturday and then the Long Mynd Valleys Race on Sunday.  I don't have the photos for the dry tooling event yet so I will post those when I get them.

As for the Valleys Race:  I planned the route using Where's The Path which is a demo of the Ordance Survey's Open Space API.  Where's the path is a great little site which is free and allows you to see an OS 1:50k map on the left and Google maps on the right.  This way you can see satellite images of the path's as you plot them.  You can then save your route direct to watch or file and get useful information such as distance to a point of your route or elevation profiles.  It's the death of Memory Map!  Once I have a GPX file from Where's the path I upload it to the conversion tool at http://www.gpsies.com/convert.do.  This allows me to get a TCX for my Garmin Forerunner 305.  I might do another blog on this when I have enough time but it's an excellent tool for route finding (it makes it virtually impossible to get lost).

With watch in hand we registered for the earlier set off of 10:30am, I wasn't sure this was necessary at the time as the cut off was 3pm.  We set off on what I knew would be a tough course, straight up the right of the Carding Mill Valley but it wasn't long before I could see the first checkpoint and all was going well!  After this I was on top of the Mynd and it was very claggy but I managed to find my rythm and had a steady pace through to checkpoint 5.

This was at around 9 miles and the elites who set off an hour later overtook me.  We turned up into a valley and up a steep hill which I really struggled on.  I had been taking gels but I don't think I'd had enough and I felt absolutely drained!  At this point I was really struggling to keep moving, not out of breath or aching just TIRED! I managed to make it over this but then dropped down into another valley before climbing again for checkpoint 6 also a real killer.  I took a gel at the top but it was too little too late, I then dropped again before crossing a stream where Alastair Tye of http://www.fellrunningpictures.co.uk/ caught me again (I tried my best to strike a pose!)

After this there was the mother of all hills (well it felt it!)  I was relieved to get to the summit and started moving again.  You may have noticed that I was running in road shoes (don't ask!), I can't count the number of times I went over!  The finish was very torn up but I made it back in one piece :)

Up to checkpoint 5 (just under 9 miles in 2 hours) I was doing really well, after that though I fell to bits :(

Split	Time	Distance    (miles)	Hight Gain (ft)	Hight Loss (ft)
1	00:16:40	1.00	566	63
2	00:17:53	1.00	438	388
3	00:14:20	1.00	278	0
4	00:10:31	1.00	60	66
5	00:10:47	1.00	11	486
6	00:18:53	1.00	320	459
7	00:22:08	1.00	541	93
8	00:10:40	1.00	109	621
9	00:35:32	1.00	539	555
10	00:32:47	1.00	669	167
11	00:40:55	1.00	563	470
12	00:19:16	1.00	112	740
13	00:02:24	0.20	0	132
Summary	04:12:51	12.20	4,206	4,240