Harvesting

Last weekend was the Harvester relays - GBs answer to Tiomila and Jukola. I confess to not having run it before because summer + orienteering + britain usually = nettles and brambles. That and it starts in the middle of the night. This year the Harvester was held in Ecclesall Woods on the outskirts of Sheffield. It's a great little area with a really good map so I signed myself up... The women's race is 5 legs, starting at 1:30 in the morning, and is run on the same course as the Juniors and B teams. Kim and Jenny P got us off to a great start running the two night legs (there can't be many teams that have the experience of two former GB WOC team runners to send out in the dark!), such a good start in fact that Lucy's dawn leg was in fact night and Clare's day leg was night/dawn. Clare was a bit suprised when she turned up for her day leg and found herself borrowing a head torch. Both ran great legs to set me off in second place overall (first women's team) and only 1 second down on our junior team... Adam pegged it out of the start and had a clear lead by the start kite. Fortunately for me he then missed number 1 slightly and and I never lost the lead after that. It was great to run under pressure and brilliant to win the overall competition :) The win also made us UK relay league champions for 2011 - hurray! More impressively there were 8 different women involved in the victory. Well done ladies!
ShUOC did an impressive job of organising and planning and this was the first event in Britain with GPS tracking. The courses were fun, the gaffling well planned and the atmosphere excellent. I hope that other clubs will follow their lead over the next years. After all, if a bunch of students get it right how difficult can it be?!!

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