Cardiff City Race 3/3/12

Photos here – sorry early runners only.

Standard results, WinSplits and SplitsBrowser.

Route Gadget available here

Pwll Du 4/3/12

Standard results, WinSplits and SplitsBrowser.

Route Gadget available here

Organiser’s Comments (Kate Balmond)

What a day, four seasons in one, but predominantly cold and windy. The “cagoules compulsory” decision that was made on the race morning was for your own safety.

I would like to thank the majority for keeping to the road crossing points as this is a very busy road with cars going very fast. I did see a few people not keeping to the designated route but fortunately there were no accidents.

Apologies to the few early starters who had to negotiate the way to the start due to the fact that my car battery went flat as I was putting out the signs and I had to be rescued. This meant your few vital pieces of red tape were put out a little late.

Planner’s Comments (Annemieke Silk)

I’ve really enjoyed the last hour of sitting in my cosy living room looking at what routes people took. – Some I never thought of and then there were others that weren’t even used. Clocking up 37km on my GPS over the weekend was all worth it after all (did I say that?). – Most of all it was a great relief that everything went according to plan and everyone arrived back safely. “Tough” it probably was, but I was delighted to see that the brown course winner was only 25 seconds over the target winning time of 57 mins. After all the thought (and discussion) that went into the course lengths I am particularly chuffed with that. So thanks to Kristian Jones for some timely running!

My memories of Pwll Du will be the cold. –Although the weather was a bit(!) grim on Sunday, I had the pleasure of enjoying a superb planning day in brilliant sunshine, blue skies, and yes wait for it, a breathtaking temperature of -5 degrees C, earlier in the year. – The snow on the ground that day, made finding the controls sites a little more challenging….. but at least I now have red shoes….

Of course all of the planning couldn’t have been done without expert help from all sides. Pete did a super job of advising me on some of the finer points of planning. Kate seemed as ever to take everything in her stride – nothing is ever too difficult, and thanks go to Gill, Jeff and Alice who so kindly helped bring in controls – my, how that was appreciated. I also need to give special thanks to the rest of the family, for their patience and hard work over the last 6 months on the household chores that were being left as I was preparing, and also in Nick’s case the lugging around of large numbers of controls on the day, (filling his wellies full of water in the process). – This all made the job possible, so thank you!

Finally congratulations to the 2012 Welsh Champions!

Controler’s Comments (Peter Ribbans)

Everything was well in hand until our previous controller suffered a stroke. Despite various attempts we were unable to find someone outside the club who was able to control the event, so I stepped in at short notice. Fortunately I found that the planner Annemieke had done significant work and that the courses required only a little fine tuning. This was especially commendable as this was the first event she had planned, apart from one of our small summer evening events.

On to the day itself. The Crowded House song Four seasons in one day keeps springing to mind – I wonder why. Despite the weather the comments were almost universally positive, which says it all really.

Finally many thanks also to Kate (Mrs Organised as always) and her dedicated team of helpers, without whom the event would not have been possible.