Mountain Hardwear Open5 - Grizedale.
Top Banana at Grizedale Open5
Jon Ellis / 11.04.2011
After registering and chatting to a few people along the way I settled down to look at the map. My first impression was that finding an obvious route wasn't going to happen, with the large number of check point in the forest combined with the large number of tracks was going to make route choice interesting. I was originally going to run first but part of the bike route looked quite committing with no short options, whereas the run had lots of options for cutting it short, therefore I swapped over ready to bike first.
I set off to find my first checkpoint which was up a bit of a rocky bridleway that I wished I was cycling down instead of up. I then set off to the furthest north westerly checkpoint, I was considering doing this as an out and back checkpoint but halfway down another rocky track I decided I would carry on down to the bottom of the hill and climb back up another bridleway picking up a nice 15 points on the way. This turned out to be a good choice with a rocky trip down but a nice smooth ride back up. Apart from the slight hiccup of cycling past one checkpoint twice before finally spotting it ,the cycling went pretty well. I missed two checkpoints and arrived back at transition 5 minutes over my 3 hour target having covered about 42km.
After a quick transition (even though I didn't have Andrea to speed me up) I headed out on the run. My plan was to head North and do a clockwise loop. I was a bit worried that the run would involve trudging along dull fire roads but there were plenty of smaller tracks included which were enjoyable to run along. I did try taking a "shortcut" from 27 to 29 by following a white track around a wall, however I think my "shortcut" took slightly under twice as long as the long route after fighting through some dense trees; needless to say I didn't try too many more shortcuts.
I decided to miss the two checkpoints on the east side of the map which gave me a reasonably un-stressful run route to complete which was a good choice as I did start to slow down a bit in the 2nd half of the run and my "run" definitely involved a fair bit of walking.
It was another well organised Open5 from Open Adventures and I was pleasantly surprised to finish 5th overall in the male solos.
SleepMonsters
