SO Sussex Sprint Series – Lancing Manor
This was certainly not going to be one of those summer events with blinding sun and heat. The heavy clouds brought the kind of moisture that is somewhere between thick mist and proper rain, with a little reminder of the real thing from time to time. At the top of the course when I looked for the sea, a couple of miles away, it was very hard to tell what was cloud, mist and water. Thankfully, the worst waited until the event was over and by the time I arrived at home, steady rain set in for the whole day.
Despite the weather I enjoyed this event. It had a great mixture. You scooted round the park as fast as you could go for the first few controls, then had to find your way into a walled garden (thankfully with low points in the wall that you could scramble over) before working round the allotments and across a meadow, where there were mown paths through metre-high herb-rich sward and into its surrounding woodland. This brought you into a long-disused quarry which was tricky underfoot in the wet and with lots of navigational pitfalls. Finally, speeding up again to go across the meadow and its woods, round the allotments and running flat out (or as near as you could make it) to the last few controls and the finish. I was not at my best – just recovering from a tummy bug – but felt reasonably comfortable running and was reasonably clean navigating.
