Mourne Mountain Marathon
Mist in the Mourne Mountains
Team Get No Sleep / 03.10.2011
The weather forecast in the days leading up to the weekend indicated that we would experience some showers and temperatures wouldn’t be too cold. The mandatory kit for the event was pretty small so we had no problem packing everything into my 22ltr Inov8 and Karen’s OMM rucksack. We travelled light and in “comfort�. Its hard to get the balance right but we were pretty happy. Our bags were packed the night before as we had an early wakeup call Saurday morning.
<b>Day 1</b>
We left Dublin at 6:50 and headed for Attical, this years event HQ. We arrived early, registered and said “hello� to a few friendly faces. Our official start time was 9:33. A small trek to the start before we dibbed, collected route cards, marked up our map and were off! Day 1 was made up of 12 controls including 4 controls in a cluster.
CP 1 was straightforward a path track junction up along Pidgeon Rock river. CP 2 was located at a quarry. I took a bearing from the wall but we ended up high and left of the quarry. As we dropped down from above we met 4 or 5 teams struggling to locate the control. We had no such problems and were in and out pretty quick.
CP 3 was a gully along the ridge heading up Slieve Muck. We crossed the road at the car park and I took a bearing right of the gully. Plan was to follow the ridge and pick up the control but we were too far left and missed it. Quick to realise our mistake we headed back along the ridge to pick up the control.
For CP 4 we continued along the ridge and contoured around Slieve Muck, crossing the wall before dropping down to the control which was located between 2 streams. We climbed to the col before crossing the wall and contouring around Carn Mountain. We then headed straight for the stile below Slieve Loughshannagh where CP 5 was located.
CP 6 was the start of the 4 control cluster. We took a minute to examine our route choices and decided on an anti clockwise loop taking in what trails were available. We were moving fast at this stage and happy with the pace we kept pushing. The recent rain meant the trails were very wet and mucky as we went around Doan and headed for a crag on the south west side of Ben Crom. The climb to the control was steep but it was easy to spot the control.
SleepMonsters
