Saturday 11 January 2025
Week 1, Day 6: Midlands XC Race 3
What a day!
We woke to beautiful sunshine in Cheltenham, but otherwise the temperatures were sub-0. It was going to be a cold XC.
I shared lifts with Angela and Ciara, and, despite driving through dense fog on route, we came out the other side and were treated to beautiful sunshine at Wetley Woods. I was feeling chuffed as we had Ciara racing for us whilst she was back from the US for the holidays, so I was hopeful for a good team result to bump us up in the overall league.
The debate of the day was what to wear (were we really going to brave vest, shorts and of course, gloves?!) and, more importantly, which shoes to wear. Spikes or trail shoes? If spikes, how short did they need to be on the frozen ground? I opted for 9mm spikes, which seemed to work fine.
I headed out for my warm up and to recce the course. Looking at the course map had really confused me. I wasn’t much clearer after my warm up having followed the tape but gone wrong multiple times. “It’ll be ok in the race”, I told myself.
We lined up for the start. Frustratingly, I found myself one row back, so didn’t have the best start. I quickly got myself into a better position and rhythm, and it was nice to drop in behind Ciara, reminding me of the many laps of the track we had run together in Andy’s Thursday group.
The course wasn’t nice. Too hilly, Really convoluted. Lots of strange twists and turns, and random extra bits which just didn’t seem to really make sense. I’d taken my inhaler but from the start felt like I’d taken about five steps back in terms of my breathing. I worked hard in the race. My legs were tired on the uphill sections and I felt like I crawled up them. But I was moving pretty well on the downhills and flatter sections and actually gained several places on a technical section through the woods, which I was pleased about. Then it all started to go a little wrong.
About 1/3 through the second lap, I somehow ended up on the wrong trail. I was following someone in red, but noticed two girls come from my left and thought they had gone wrong. I carried on pushing to finish the lap (which of course included an extra convoluted extra bit for the run in to the finish), only to find out from the girls on the finish line that I had accidentally cut a corner. I was surprised, as my watch had measured over the stated distance (not that they are that accurate), so I knew I couldn’t have missed much.
I headed straight to tell the officials, and after checking the course map and my GPS trace, went back to the referee to explain. He informed me that I would probably be disqualified – cue tears in a frozen field on the edge of Birmingham. In that moment, I felt terrible. I had let the team down. I would now not have enough runs to place in the individual league, which I had wanted to do this year.
Writing this a day later, I’m fine with being disqualified, though as far as I am aware, I am still listed in the results as I type. I assume I will be removed when they finalise the provisional results.
Yes, it’s frustrating what happened and of course I wish it hadn’t. But I made a genuine mistake, in a race which was confusing, poorly taped and poorly marshalled*, and went straight to own up about it, once I realised what had happened. It doesn’t take away from the quality of the run or the wider performance, and it wasn’t an A-race.
*Apparently, the marshals brough Meg Marchant, who came 1st, into the finish funnel about 1.5km too early, got confused and then made her run the rest of the course having lost her 20-30 second lead.
As I type, I’m listed in 9th place. Ciara finished behind me, approximately 1 minute later in 14th. Whether I would have stayed ahead of her as she chased me down, we won’t know but I was ahead of her when I went wrong and don’t think I missed a minute’s worth of the course. So I put myself about 12-15th – somewhere around there, making it one of my ‘best’ and ‘worst’ Midland XC performances.