Event Reports - Orienteering & Salomon Trail Run

Over the past 2 weekends between us we have completed in an orienteering event at Westerfolds Park and Karina raced the Long course Salomon Trail Series at Plenty Gorge last sunday.

ORIENTEERING

Paul and Karina did an Orienteering event at Westerfolds park a couple of weeks back. It was good run to test out the new shoes from Active Feet, we ran from Warrandyte to Templestowe, did 2 orienteering courses and then ran back to Warrandyte, 32km run all up and good fun.
The plan was to get a good long run in and also get some navigation practice, as Westerfolds Park is a regular riding and running spot for us, we already knew our way around the park, which was definitely an advantage and allowed us to leave the compass packed away.
We decided to race individually to take advantage of getting navigation practice in, we started with course "A" which was the long course and had us covering approximately 7km. Paul blitzed this course, flying past Karina very early on, after starting 1 minute behind. Paul finished fairly high up in the results and Karina was mid field.
After having a taste of orienteering we decided to give course "B" a go, not realising that many of the points were used for both courses, so it was much easier to navigate. Once again Karina had a 1 minute start on Paul and with less navigation involved she managed to finish without Paul running her down. The results for course "B" had us 1st and 2nd overall, with Karina just pipping Paul by a massive 1 second.
The run home was probably the best training that we did of the day, as we were both fatigued, but we pushed home strong, walking a hill or two........32km in the legs!!! And no blisters with the new runners kindly supplied to us by our generous sponsor Active Feet.


SALOMON TRAIL RUN - 18KM LONG COURSE

Karina decided to do the Plenty Gorge 18km Salomon Trail Run last weekend, but in order to get in a sunday morning mountain bike ride she talked a few other crazy people (Philippa, Glen) into riding there and back with her and doing the run.
The ride there was 25km and Paul joined us for some of this, we were also joined by Pete Hepworth from Topgear Cycles who is one of our generous sponsors. Pete knows the area well, so he took us on an adventure, finding as much single track as he could for us.

Bike shoes off and runners on, Karina and Philippa lined up at the start line with about 1 minute to spare and had a quick discussion about how far we were running and how long that should take (which we estimated completely wrong, not factoring in the singletrack, vertical dirt or knee deep creek crossing that lay ahead).

The first 12km was damn hard, with lots of ups/downs, 2 creek crossings, mud, sloping singletrack, lots of rocks and uneven ground. At the finish of the first 12km my thoughts were, we only have the 6km course to go now which is the short course so one would assume it was the easier tracks. Well I couldn't have been more wrong, this section was hard work, with another 2 creek crossings and a constant roller coaster of vertical dirt, many people were suffering and the smiles on peoples faces were quickly disappearing as was my average pace on my GPS watch. Just when we thought we had finished the run, they sent us down another hill, just so that we had another vertical climb to the finishline.

The end results was 1st in age group for Philippa (4th overall in females), 7th in age group for Karina (10th overall in females) and 9th overall for Anna (one of our friends). So with the 3 of us girls all finishing in the top 10, with 120 girls in the event, we did ok. We did all meet up at about the 3km mark just for a chat, as us girls do! It was a fab event and although the hills were tough, I did love them!!!

After a quick shock with presentations, with Phlip taking out the open females and winning a HR monitor, it was bike shoes back on and Karina, Philippa and Glen took the slow and steady approach for the ride home as we were all a little fatigued (Glen ran the 12km). The ride home was 22km, we didn't add on any extra km's and had some good navigation practice as Pete had tour guided us there.

TOTAL - 47km on the mtb, 18km of trail running

Photo - Philippa, Karina, Glen....ready to ride home