NWJS weekend 29/30th September

Saturday:
Saturday was on the sand dunes near Haverigg in the south lakes. These are grassy as well as sandy (unlike the wooded dunes found in Scotland) so an added challenge was actually running up some of the sandier slopes. With 3 separate exercises to get through (a time trial, simplification exercise and attack points exercise) the pace was steady (more so for some than others) yet purposeful. For me the time trial was a nightmare of a first exercise on a strange scale (1:7500 with 2.5m contours). After that I began to get used to the rapidly changing terrain (flat to dunes and back again) so the other two exercises went well.
The 'serious' exercises were followed by a clock relay (see attached map) in pairs with a novelty item. Each runner goes out to the control, picks up the item and moves it round a control before coming back to tig their partner who does the same. There was some bending/changing of the rules whereby each runner simply drops the item a bit further round a rough circle in view of the next runner.

Sunday:
Sunday incorporated the BL regional event at High Pike which for me meant my final run on JM5Medium. The course was open and fast (depending on how well the climb in the first half of the course was tackled) as the second half was entirely downhill running. 49 minutes for 6.2km wasn't bad but a few small errors could have been cut out to get closer to the winner's time (around 44 minutes).

23rd September - JM5L race

This was the first proper race back in the season for me and as such i was slightly apprehensive. The event was at Ainsdale dunes over near Southport and it was on sand and thick and low vegetation, which is one of my least favourite terrain types. Also I hadn't been feeling well up till then and had spent Saturday in bed instead of helping run an event. Now that my excuses are out of the way...
The course I was on was JM5L and was 6.8km, climb unspecified.
The start of the race was a complete nightmare, I got my angle from the start wrong and ended up going to control 2 instead of control 1, however from here I knew where I was and could work my way back. Having already been to number 2 that was pretty easy but then number 3 proved to be another problem. This first section was over extremely complex and slow terrain and probably cost me about 10 minutes in total.
The next section of controls, number 4 to 16 was over quicker terrain in the southern area of the map and here I felt more at home with quick running between large attack points and then careful navigation nearer to the control being the main feature of the running, I felt confident over this section and was quickly able to settle into a nice and consistent runnign speed, something which i have been working on over the summer whilst training.
The last section of the course went back into the complex section at the north of the map and this time i faired much better and made only slight navigational errors with the last two controls being comparative flyers.
Overall posistion 4/5 in JM5L, time of 66 mins. The winner achieved 48 but 2nd place was 62. As a result I am overall happy with this race.

Liam