Ultra Difficult Ulpha Park


After a decent night at Hawkshead Youth Hostel we put the skills we learnt yesterday to real use at a District Event held by LOC at Ulpha Park. Well the skills would have been put to use but a number of Chasers cars took the wrong turning (much to our amusement) and took ages to arrive... (Shall I name names?!).
I went for the Brown course which was 6.8k with 300m of climb. The first control involved running back through the start and finding a stream with the control just beyond. Unfortunately I undershot the control as I found a stream which I later found out was unmarked (perhaps due to the recent heavy rain) so lost 4mins just to begin with. After that the second control was on the other side of a very large hill so decided to contour round, but made a total dogs dinner of it and ended up far too close to the boundary walls - the best option for me would have just been to go direct so lost another 4mins. The next control was fine, although I lost 20 secs overshooting it, but number four was a real toughy with lots of contours and fallen trees so lost contact with the map. I wondered around for a bit before eventually finding it. Numbers 5-11 I managed to find ok mainly due to a series of decent bearings. Number 12 I also found ok, but due to the crags ended up going a bit too low, but didn't lose any major time to the control. Number 13 was not so unlucky for me as I hit the open section, went along the ride and took a bearing for the remainder so hit the control perfectly. 14-15 was a bit of a mare as I took a partly unmarked ride which had several fallen trees and so was a bit like a scene out of the Krypton Factor. I then contoured round the crags and hit the control ok. To number 16 I went too far to the right but could see the control ok, so lost around 20-30secs. Number 18 was ok except for the vicinity of the control where some of the crags on the ground were a bit confusing, but managed to get myself back on the right track by climbing back up to the veg boundary. The remainder of the course was fairly straight forward.

I finished in a time of 1hr 26min which was a bit disappointing but most of my time was lost quite early on (probably 10 mins for the first 4 controls alone), but one of the positives was that I didn't get lost in the second half of the course. At the time of leaving I was third last with the winner finishing in around an hour. Had I not lost all that time early on I would have been mixing it with the majority of the other finishers. However, I learnt a lot from my mistakes so hopefully wont be making them again... Next week I might go to the LEI regional event at Corby or maybe the EPOC Huddersfield event at Marsden or might just have a week off!

EDIT: 15th out of 36 so not so bad as I thought! Without the early stupid mistakes I would have been around 8th.

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