Peak District Open 5

The Open 5's are a series of winter adventure races organised by openadventure.com. The challenge is to get as many points as you can in 5 hours of running and biking. I race with a mate from Kendal, Ant Cooper in the male pairs category. We have done pretty well at it in the past. I had missed the first in this series and Ant had organised it. I was looking forward to getting stuck in.

 

The run went ok but we probably ran for too long (over 2 hours) and I finished the run with cramp in both calves. Unusual for me, cramp doesn't normally kick in until about hour 4! Anyone out there give me some tips on how not to get cramp? Probably this time it was the effect of not enough running before hand, mud and trying to keep up with a faster team mate.

 

A little boggy underfoot!

The bike went very smoothly - zero nav errors, good route choice. The cramp in my calves was painful but not too debilitating, although Ant did push me up some of the hills. At one point we thought that we had missed out too many checkpoints on the way round but in the end got back with 10 minutes to spare.

 

At download we found that we had got 470 points; hardly record beating but enough to make prize giving a bit tense. The scores were read out 5^th place 460, 4^th place 465, 3^rd place us, woop, woop. Then the biggest shock of all 1^st and 2^nd tied on 473 points. Al and Ifor Powell winners having beaten Andy Preedy and Peter Stobbs by 10 seconds. Al and Ifor Powell won the 1^st open 5 in the lakes by some margin but just scraped round after having a nightmare on the bike with multiple snapped chains and a lot of towing.

Ant just after the final checkpoint.

So, definitely pleased with 3^rd but if only we hadn't run past that 5 pointer towards the end of the run. That's the way it goes. Better luck next time. Congratulations to the winners.

 

Congratulations too to Sally Ozanne who started mountain biking last year and came 1^st in her second ever adventure race.

 

Photos courtesy of James Kirby at http://www.jameskirby.me.uk/.

Photos from the race also available on sleepmonsters.

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