Thanks to everyone who came along to our Sprint event at Tweedbank. It’s not often that we can offer a event which was so convenient for public transport. We strongly believe in supporting local businesses so our prizes were all sourced locally – Tempest Brewery in Tweedbank and Simply Delicious (Tablet) in Melrose.

Although we now have mapped many urban areas all across the Borders, Tweedbank was our very first urban area (in 1989) and I do hope you can now see why.

Come and join us in May if you can for our series of 4 Wednesday evening sprint events in a range of woodland and parkland settings.

Andrew Armstrong, Organiser

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I managed to get the winning times fairly close to the 12-15 minute guideline for all courses so I was happy with that.

The Championship courses were deliberately fairly straightforward in the first half, tempting runners into running too hard or getting complacent, but you still had to stay in control and leave enough in the tank for the hill and some tricky navigation in the second half. The SOUL courses tried not to be a re-run of the first race so everyone had different controls for this, and most courses visited new areas of the map which I used to inject some long legs with at least 2 route choices.

I’ve dug out the 1989 version of the map, a handrawn 1:5000 affair with the only housing being north of the pond. The houses at the south-west corner were under construction but there were only fields between the pond and the industrial estate. No railway station of course ! It’s been an ongoing mapping project for various club members for the past 36 years and it’s still ongoing with the industrial estate constantly changing but it remains one of our prime areas.

A few thanks: Tweedbank Primary School, the Animal & Plant Health Agency (next to the Finish), various residents and businesses that let me put controls on their property, John Tullie for pre-running some provisional courses and finding routes I hadn’t anticipated, Paul McGreal RR for manning the computers which allowed me to plan for a change, Allie Wilson Craw for Controlling, and all the RRs who helped on the day.

Lindsey Knox, Planner

Results:

Full results are now HERE. Apologies they weren’t on the address shown on some of your splits – fall-out from the website problems I had mid-week.

Planner/Organiser’s Report

This was my first time planning at Bowmont, so it was quite enjoyable getting to experience a forest in more detail than you normally do just running round.

Storm Eowyn rather interrupted the planning and organising process for Bowmont and caused the delay and change of date. It also meant that I had to revise many of my original planning ideas. I hope that you found the resulting courses both challenging and interesting.

The Light Green was my attempt to join up the most technically challenging bits of Bowmont with some decent route choice alternatives but without making it too rough going underfoot. I was very impressed by the speed of the front runners! The Red was planned as a runners course, more on tracks but still with some interesting route choice and visiting some nice bits of the forest. Yellow and Orange are aimed to be stepping stones for beginners – on reflection Yellow was perhaps slightly too difficult, perhaps exacerbated by paths blocked by fallen trees!

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t quite as nice as the day before when I was putting controls out but it was still pretty good for the time of year – and Bowmont was as dry underfoot as I have seen it at this time of year.

I hope you all enjoyed yourself.

Thanks to everyone who helped on the day but particularly Lindsey who gave up her run to organise registration and download.

John Tullie