The long race at EYOC today proved a real challenge for the GB team with a retirement, a mispunch and some challenging legs.
The map was incredibly green with the visibility proving poor for large sections of the courses. Many athletes made use of small trains, catching those who started ahead and being caught from behind, often 3 or 4 athletes finishing in quick succession.
With David Bunn not racing as he manages an injury, GB’s earliest starter was Annika Schwarze-Chintapatla who started strongly with the 11th fastest time to the checkpoint but the latter stages of the race didn’t go so well and two mispunched controls meant no result for Annika.
First GB debutant into the forest was Alice Wilson who had reasonable run finishing 66, other debutant’s Rachel Brown and Joe Hudd found the forest tough to navigate with Joe retiring after struggling from the outset. Jim Bailey put together the best result of the debutant’s finishing in 31st.
Matthew Gooch started strongly, 5th at the radio control, and pushed himself to the limit but finished slowly and struggled over the line. Matt’s recovering well and looking forward to the relay. Lizzie Stansfield lost some time early but built her race to finish *.
Top of the Brit’s was Flurry Grierson who finished 24th working with a small group for most of the race.
Flurry said “My run was a mixed bag of mistakes and fast legs in some of the nicer parts of the forest. So much of the course was on pretty unique terrain with very little room for error but I did enjoy it”
24 Flurry Grierson
31 Jim Bailey
55 Rachel Brown
56 Alice Wilson
61 Matthew Gooch
66 Lizzie Stansfield
MP Annika Schwarze-Chintapatla
RTD Joe Hudd
Full results are available from here. The top 3's saw a large number of Eastern European athletes who, with similar home terrain, clearly coped well with the challenging forest.
The team are now resting and preparing for the relays tomorrow with hopes of better results and less green maps.