What's brown and sticky

New Choooos

New Chew short score

Quote of the day from Ray M "We wont be wearing shorts and topping up our suntans then".

Half an hour earlier we had been driving northbound enjoying the blue skies and sunshine. We turned off the M1 and before we had even hit the Peak National Park boundary, the blue skies changed into dense low cloud.
Which for some reason we both found  hilarious.

Our hosts and race organisers for the New Chew were the Saddleworth Runners Club who did us proud. It was well organised, welcoming and friendly with a great venue and courses.

We chose the short score class, where we were given three and a half hours to go and visit as many of the controls that had been marked up on a specially printed, pre marked OS map.  A format that Ray and I have done a quite a few times before and both enjoy. 

There were a few differences to other score events we have done; It was a new area to us,  we were using Orienteering style punches and cards( last time we used them we DNFed ), but the biggest difference was the controls. We are used to Mountain Marathon sized orange and white Kites. This time we had to go out into the clag looking for a load of...... 'sticks'. 

 The checkpoints were 2x2  stakes, marked with the control letter, a number and with an orienteering pin-punch atached. As it turned out looking for sticks in the low clouds just added to the fun. 

The bad viz forced us to slow right down and concentrate on our nav, which was good as we often end up running when we should be map reading, ending up over shooting controls and having to relocate. This time we took more care and managed to find all the controls we planned on visiting, cool!

With the clag being down we took a conservative route and didn't manage to do much running but had a great three and a half hours, playing in the northern Peak District. 

Dropping down off the hills we returned to the start venue, where the Saddleworth Runners had put on a fine spread for us.  The icing on the cake, team Ibuprofen had somehow managed to come home in 4th place. Woo hoo!

Highlights and randoms

• Catching up with Simon the Fellmonkey and his team mate Glen. They finished 11th in the main event. Well done for digging deep mate.
• Cheese & potato bake with pickled red cabbage.
• finding the 'Lone Tree'.
• Meeting Ian of Just Us and a Few Friends . I think Ian may have me down as a stalker.
• Quality cakes and a nice cuppa tea.
• Not getting lost.

A big thank you to The Saddleworth Runners Club for putting on a cracking event. See you next year.

Enjoying the view

Is it that way

The usually grippy gritstone had been transformed to slipstone  by green slime  

Northern rock