British Sprint and Middle Championships

March 24th and 25th brought the British Spring and Middle Championships in York. There was a bit of a panic over accommodation and transport to start with as EUOC was not going as a club. But that all got sorted...eventually.

After a long car ride down to york and a night sleeping in a tent, we woke up to it being quite foggy out as we made our way to the Bus for the sprint. The sprint was help at York University and consisted of heats in the morning and finals in the afternoon. I ran the Women's C heat in the morning. It was a course of 2.4km, 20m climb, 19 controls with 28 women racing, but only the top 6 would make it into the final.


I made such a muck up coming out of the start. I had not mentally gotten into the task at hand and just was worried about running fast and having a good run. Not the way you want to start your first British champs event! After punching the first control though I was able to sort of restart my thought process and really got into the map afterwards. Was feeling much better! Flow was back and a bit of speed and was planning pretty well. Over all I wanted to be happy about this race but knew I needed to change how i dealt with the start that afternoon. Here are the results W21-C, and as you can see there was a very strong field won by Linnea Gustafsson current World Champion.

Running into the GO control!

After some food and a pep talk from Colm it was time to race again. Racing in the B final took some pressure off me but was still nervous about the start. Got there in loads of time and just played through my head what i talked to Colm about. when I heard the long beep of my start I was ready to kick butt. I had a fairly clean race with only a few hesitations and it landed me in 12th in the final. Feeling thats not to bad considering I was sick all week. And it was my first WRE run!


The Sunday brought the Middle Championships at Strensall Common. It started off being a VERY foggy morning as we drove to the event, but just as we were turning into the park the sun came out and the fog burnt off giving us a lovely day! The warm up map to the start I think was key today! The map was flatter than I have ever seen, which was emphasized by the fact that the course climb was 0m, yes zero! never seen that before! However, the warm up map also showed that it was going to be tough underfoot with all the ground being fairly tuskety and full of pits. I was having a hard time putting things together on the warm up to the start. I tired my best to again run through my head what Colm had said yesterday and it worked for getting me to the first control, even if it was slow. I still wasn't feeling fully in the race though. I had hit the first two controls ok and my mind switched over to thinking about outcome and how I needed to race well today. What frustrated me the most was I knew when on the course I needed to switch my train of thought, that in order to do well I needed to have a clean process based run. I finally was able to switch over after control 7 and have a good run. I ended up placing 22nd in W21E



I think the thing I learned the most this weekend is that I have actually put in time to train and that I am actually at a higher standard than I first thought I was. I was a bit intimidated by running against the elite Brits. But that is gone and I'm looking forward to bringing my A game to the JK and being up there in the mix.