Thank you all for coming to Birdlip. I hope you enjoyed running on our new area, in spite of some inevitable steep climbing. It was great to finally be able to put this event on after two previous postponements for Covid, which of course led to an unusually large attendance for one of our league events. I have been considering mapping Barrow Wake for several years, but it was only fairly recently that I worked out how to make an event feasible there, by having a longish walk to the start and combining it with Witcombe Woods, which I had mapped previously.
I stood for 20 minutes or so at the road crossing, a great place to observe people arriving after the stiffest climb. It was interesting to see the difference between those people taking the longer path route that followed the Cotswold Way compared with the majority who hauled themselves up the extremely steep straight-line route. The ones on the path were fresh-faced and ready to run on, whereas the straight liners were completely done-in and ready for a cardiac arrest! I reckon this may be a case of the straight line not always being best. Similarly, 2 consecutive legs shared by both Brown and Blue each offered a flattish but longer contouring route, but having spoken to various people after their runs and looking at Routegadget, almost nobody chose these routes, instead opting for the straighter routes which involved some unnecessary steep climbing. These legs were 10-11-12 on Blue or 16-17-18 on Brown. It would be interesting to analyse which way was faster, but I suspect the longer flatter routes would actually win. I’d be interested to hear people’s views on this – why not post something on our club Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/NorthGloucestershireOC.
See you all at Huntley next week – another new area!
Greg Best