Easter Carnival: Harding’s Paddock and The Sprints

This blog covers he last 3 days – for the much diminished group remaining.

Thursday was a low key event on Harding’s Paddock (which was in fact mostly bush) a little south of Ipswich. The map is in the gallery below. A tricky course that lulled you into a false sense of security. A few of us had trouble even on control 1. The other trick was finding the way through the deep green Lantana around the creek. I ended used the dry sandy blue creeks themselves because I couldn’t find the secret path shown to the far west that was harder to find than it looks ! Ewen had a really good event, coming close to my time despite a lower speed. Sausages & drinks after were part of the deal. Still quite warm.

Apparently there is a group of retirees who run events every Thursday for themselves, and others such as Uni students & proffessors also occasionally make an appearance. Rod of this group gave Suzanne and myself a lift to Brisbane when Ewen went back to Stanthorpe to rescue Henk (who is feeling better by the way).

Suzanne & I clambered around Mt Coutha on Friday after being dropped off at the top cafe by Ian, my brother on his way into work. Birthday dinner in Toowong joined by Henk & Ewen.

Today the sprint events were a lot of fun. They were the tricky navigational universitycampus types that really keep you thinking hard the whole way. Apologies in advance for the dodgy map quality in my photos. For a start they were fairly hard to read anyway, but the morning event at the Kelvin Grove QUT campus on Pretex was a lot better than the afternoon, very dark printing, map on plastic bagged paper UQ St Lucia campus.

In the morning we competed in our normal age groups, and I managed a 4th, almost a 3rd place, but for a 30 sec error I made punching a later control 11 on my way to 9 (I have a bit of an unfortunate  habit of this). Suzanne had a good run against a very competitive field who would probably do very well against the Elites. A hard, but very brief tropical rain shower doused her just after she started. Ewen had a ‘mp’ which he was a bit bamboozeld by, till he got the map and realised he’d just missed 8 altogether.

In the afternoon we all did a Sunley. Doing a Sunley entails entering Elites in a sprint, even though hopelessly outclassed, just to get a decent run. However, we also took the precaution of entering in disguise. Suzanne (Ingrid, lisped with an outrageous scandanavian accent) had flowing golden locks, Ewen made a pretty below par attempt at Elvis impersonation, and my super-sized afro bore an unintentional but convincing resemblance to a certain Elite called David Sheppard. The other thing you should also note when doing a Sunley is whether the 2 sprints on the 1 day are actually part of the same event (ooops), so they ended up putting us at the end of the chasing starts, after all the morning mp Elites. We also had a very minature Warren Key in Elites (Warren had mp’d in the morning so gave Ashton a go in the afternoon instead; and lil-Warren beat me, as it turns out).

I actually made a pretty good bash at this event, and had I not been tricked by a ‘switch’ control to go direct 7 -> 8/12 -> 13 (the map was very dark and 8/12 -> were in a direct line so an understandable mistake in retrospect, that others also made on my 1b varient), I wouldn’t actually have been last. Oh well, missing out 9,10,11,12 loop is a definite mp. Lil Warren (Ashton) did M21E in 32 minutes, and he is only 10 or something ! Ingrid had the same ‘switch’ control, but was more cautious and finished the W21E sprint properly, complete with the aforementioned much admired golden plaits swinging about. Elvis took his 50 minutes cautiously, but also left the building with an M21E under his ample belt.

Henk was picked up by his sister, and we now have a hire car, picked up with some jiggery pokery at midday today. At least it means we can get to the last event tomorrow. Why they didn’t have the Brisbane sprints on Sunday I have no idea !?

Here’s an edited video of Day 1 Sledge mass start. Unfortunately still quite jerky (David Stratten would be unimpressed), but the raw footage is far worse!). http://youtu.be/dR1_elwgwuA