Long Course, 17.5km and very hilly, lots of technical sections and 4 river crossings.
It’s a long drive from Seaford to Plenty. When we left home the car temperature gauge displayed 4 degrees Celsius. As we drove to Plenty it continued to drop to zero. I’m not sure if our car can display minus temperatures, but I’m told the official temperature was minus 2 and it certainly felt cold. I was initially thinking of racing in a singlet, but quickly changed my mind and selected a long sleeve t-shirt, running cap and gloves. I carried two gels in a zip pocket in the rear of my shorts (although I only had one during the race).
I went out too hard at the Kew race (2nd year in a row), so I was determined to pace myself more sensibly from the start this time. A bottleneck was pretty much guaranteed at the first river crossing, but with 4.5km to travel before this, I believed I’d have time to manoeuvre myself into a bit of a gap. As a result I lined up a fair distance back from the start to surround myself with slower runners - Mistake!
Firstly I underestimated how slow these other runners are and their total inability to run down a hill. Last year I was running near the front of the Medium Course field and didn’t realise that there were bottlenecks before the river crossing. Around the 2km mark I found myself standing in a queue watching the competitors in front descend down one of the trickier hills. As planned, I worked my way into a gap before the river crossing by moving to the front of a group with a good 50 metres to the next competitor. Again I underestimated people’s ability and found myself in a queue once more, this time watching people gingerly tackling the river crossing in the most painstakingly slow methods possible.
The rest of the run went quite smoothly as I slowly picked my way up through the field, but all up I believe I wasted close to a minute standing in queues which is quite frustrating.
The first two thirds of the course is exactly the same as the Medium Course race Elaine and I did last year. The last third is the Short Course from 2 years ago. I knew all the technical sections were in the first section and I also knew the last 5km contained the steepest and longest hills.
Other than the disaster of the early queueing, I was generally happy with my pacing for this race. Unlike Kew I was not overrun by other competitors near the end. A few passed me in the last 5km, but I think I was overtaking more than I was overtaken. With around 2km to go I was completely wrecked, but still had enough in me to take advantage of a long descent and made up a couple more places before slowly jogging up the last hill to the finish. Probably not my best ever race but a vast improvement over my efforts at Kew.
This is Elaine’s favourite course, mainly because of the river crossings. She still loved the course, but really struggled on the day and ended up walking large portions of the course.
Merryn, Anita, Sarah and Mikey all turned up to do their first ever Salomon Trail Run. Sarah won her age group and 2nd female overall in the Short Course (so I’m guessing she enjoyed herself). Merryn and Anita also raced the Short Course while Mikey did the Medium Course. Merryn absolutely loved it, Anita thought is was OK and I’m not sure Mikey was all that impressed.
