West Midlands League 1 - Oversley Woods

Well what can I say - firstly that I'm glad that I didn't do the Midland Night Champs at the same venue the night before - it would have been a total nightmare!

The car parking field was completely waterlogged (though the students at Warwick seemed to enjoy getting muddy pushing the cars!). Thankfully I found an area by the field with hard standing...

The map is pretty small shown by the 1:7,500 scale with two parts on the Brown. To be honest I hated every minute of the course - no disrespect to Graham Gristwood the Planner but the area was really grotty. Full of Brambles and grot everywhere - if it wasn't a West Mids League event I would have retired. The runnable forest was mainly slow run, the slow run was mainly walk and the fight was 'are you mad?!'. I kind of gave up taking it seriously fairly early on, but either way still finished 8th out of 18. What was slightly annoying was that I was only five secs behind the leading M21 so didn't quite manage the 100 points for the league (assume I got 99).

I know this is a fairly bold statement - but looking at the last two West Mids League events (WRE at Haughmond Hill together with this one) the West Mids League is a joke if this is supposedly the best terrain in the area - clearly the organising committee don't look at whether the area is the best there is to offer (let alone suitable for C3 event - West Mids Night Champs). No wonder the club don't take the league so seriously any more...

On a separate note it appears that I was the 2006 West Mids Night Champ held at LEI Bagworth Woods recently (didn't realise until I got the latest edition of the West Midlander...). First real Championship title I've won...

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