Behind the Scenes: Yorkshire Dales Open 5, 3 Mar 2013

The March 2013 Haglofs Open 5 was in my backyard.  More or less.  Or at least it was my backyard before I decided to change careers and move to Utah to pursue a job in nutrition.   So I am writing this from thousands of miles away now and wish all of my friends in England a rather tearful goodbye. 

But back to the race, or should I say race planning.  Knowing that this would be my last event in the UK (almost literally as I flew out the next day) I volunteered to help Tom Needham with the planning of the race.  As it turned out, Tom had other things come up and didn't have much time to plan, so I was happy to step up and do a bit more.  My last tour of the local moors, I guess you could say. 

I started with the run course, and with a blank map started wandering around the countryside looking for cool things to attach controls to.   My map soon became littered with notes, cool places to attach controls, cool things to see, and I discovered much more about my lovely backyard than I had imagined.

After the notes came a few meetings with Nicki, more recce time, more revising, and finally the maps.  There were some bumps in the road.  Who knew I wasn't supposed to attach controls to things that weren't actually a feature on the map?  But that tree is out the middle of nowhere all by itself, and it's really cool, can't we use it anyway?!  We got creative with a few locations, and I sacrificed my favorite tree because there was absolutely nothing near it we could use.   (Racers, you got lucky as that saved a bit of up and down on the run!).  Our first bike recce was a muddy, snowy mess...it took us 5 hours to get around half of the course and it was very slow going.   Mentally I was saying YES!...no one is going to clear my course!

When the time came to put out the controls, it hadn't rained for a few days and the going was marginally better.   But the winds were howling and we had two long days of fighting our way out onto the moors while attempting to drive to as many as we could.   When we split up to do some of the run, I  put out a couple of controls, then finally arrived at my final location.  Doh!  I had left all of my cables back at the last control!  #$%@   Huffing back to get my supplies took the energy out of me, and I left the lone control for the next morning instead.

Race day was perfect.  The weather had been dry for 2 weeks, the trails were super fast, it wasn't sunny but at least it wasn't cold or windy either.     I enjoyed the day spent in transition checking all of the racers in and out and watching the smiles on their faces.  A minor hiccup was in the form of a stolen control, near an intersection.  A replacement was put out but that couldn't account for time lost searching for it, sorry.   The leaders didn't seem to care, as they were on the way to clearing the course with time to spare...in perfect weather that's bound to happen.   All in all, everything seemed to go smoothly, even the setup and teardown of the new yellow Haglofs sign.

So thanks everyone for coming to race in my old backyard.  I miss you all, and you are welcome to come visit me in my new backyard, anytime!

Sarah finds my favorite tree!

Adrian on the limestone pavement

The cow "pandas" make a reappearance