LAMM 2012

Team Peplinski and Penderis on the B course.

Well where to start with the LAMM. This was the fourth year that I have paired up with George Peplinksi (and yes, he keeps resisting the pressure to join Westies!). The LAMM is a different race, in that your main concern is finishing or not embarrassing yourself by getting horribly lost. As it turned out it was not me that needed to be worried, but our rather youthful bus. At the start of the LAMM you head to your muster point, pick up your map, but never really know whether you are starting from there or if there will be a bus to drop you off somewhere remote. Once on the bus you frantically follow the bus route on the map to work out where you are being dropped off. Well our bus driver headed all the way up to Glen Coe before realising he was lost and heading back to Bridge of Orchy over an hour late.

The first day we just started off steady, the legs are getting a little old for this game and we thought we would not push it too hard. The B course control choices were probably the best of all the courses with some big hills and a variety of route choices for most of them. Our map reading went well and we dropped straight onto all the controls on day 1 without any hunting around with just one poor route choice that cost us 5 or 10 minutes of extra running. I had a bit of cramp starting on the last climb and after worrying that it meant I would be knackered for day 2 it just turned out to be not drinking enough water in the heat. Eventually we dropped into the midcamp just over 5 and a half hours running, thinking that the route was fairly short this year. Wondering if we made the chasing start (within 1.5 hours of the leaders) we were slightly shocked to find the reason our time was so fast was that we were the group leaders.

Day 2 we were at the front of the chasing start, but were soon caught by Jasmin Paris (Carnethy) and her brother, we clung on to them for a couple of checkpoints, but they soon outran our tiring legs. We though they were well ahead of us, but they made a navigation mistake later and we passed them without realising until the finish. The eventual winners passed us up the last big climb and another team sneaked past without us noticing (the joys of different route choices) leaving us in third overall for the B class. Final results: 1st position for day 1, 4th position for day 2, overall 3rd for the B course. Good weekend: definitely! Good result: nobody was more surprised than us!

Well done to any other Westies who ran, and hopefully you all enjoyed it as much.