Smashed my way through Woodhill Forest today for the third race in the Bivouac Outdoor Rogaine Series to take the win over Thomas Reynolds.
Check out my winning route here on my DOMA page. My GPS was pretty inaccurate and there were some bizarre loops and squiggles in my GPS track.
The main idea around my plan was to leave the western area until the end because with was a low value area, that is, the average number of points per minute was lower than most other areas. If I was to run out of time I would be happy to miss out this area. I chose very different routes to my main competition, the two other GKO athletes Jourdan and Thomas.
So how did I take the win? I think my regular training over the past 2 weeks has helped me a lot and this was the fastest I have been since NZ Champs in April. I even did my first interval training session since February on Thursday, the classic Moneghetti! I could feel I was going pretty fast through the first 6 controls, but a mistake going into 51 lost me about a minute. I also lost more time on the way to 43 when I fell into a pile of logs in long grass and broke my watch strap. I only managed to recover 3 of the 4 pieces of my Garmin and walked the next few hundred meters as I tried to put it back together. Sadly I couldn’t and I ended up just carrying it in my hand for the rest of the race. Anyway, I’ll get over it and try to fix it properly soon.
I had a slower patch in the middle of my race but recovered enough to smash the last half. I was on 50 minutes at my 20th control and 60 minutes at my 25th so I was confident that I would get all the points. It took 20 minutes to get the last 5 controls worth 210 points demonstrating the idea of low points per minute.
I made this graph to show where the areas of good and bad value were. 2 of the 3 bad sections were in the coastal area and one was a longer leg running the road from 46 to 58.
Overall I ran 14.7km to get all 1200 points in 80 minutes averaging 5:26 minutes per km. I’m looking forward to the final race of the series in 2 weeks!