Edinburgh Rat Race

Wow, ok, running out of feeble excuses for not updating this more often, but lost passwords have caused me a few problems, honestly!

Just catching up from the Edinburgh Rat Race 2007, where I raced with the Aberdeen Asset Management team of Nick Gracie and Helen Jackson, the current British Champions. It was a real honour, though the pressure was on, as I was navigating and on route choice duties…

Saturday night went ok, though route choice probably wasn’t the best, as we missed a few checkpoints that closed early and there were queues at some of the others. I made a route choice early on and would have made a different choice if I’d taken more time to think about it. Oh well not to worry, but it put us 15mins behind Inov 8 for Sundays stage.

Sunday started great and we got a good 5 minute lead over The North Face and Inov8 but TNF were on a flyer and once we had a puncture they got away from us. Soon after we were caught by Inov 8 as we weaved our way through the South Edinburgh suburbs, towards the Pentland Hills and the heat started to get to us a little bit. I was sweating like a man on death row and was drinking Nuun by the bladder load, but I’d made it up too weak so it wasn’t being as effective as it should have been, meaning I began to cramp up on the orienteering run section. The next section was a disaster. I realised I’d lost the map of the Pentlands earlier in the day and had to try and memorise the whole of the next section. Unfortunately this didn’t go too well and we missed one of the checkpoints on the way up on the hills and though we collected it on the way down, we were penalised 30 minutes for doing them out of order. Thankfully in the end, we managed to avoid losing any more time and finished in 3rd place just 4 mins ahead of 4th, by the time our penalty had been added.

A great race once again and a pleasure to race with Aberdeen, here’s hoping they’ll have me back!