Oslo City Cup

Last night I took part in the 3rd Oslo City Cup of the year. The cup is a series of sprint races around Oslo, and unlike mid week events in Britain, where you get maybe 50 people on a good day, the turn out at one of these sprint races is more like 3-400. There is only one course (plus novice), and people start at 15 second intervals, often with 2 people starting at once. There was still 10cm of snow on the ground, and after about 10 minutes there was both a track and a line of people around most of the course. That meant there was little technical challenge, and it was actually more challenging getting past the hundreds of slower runners on the course!

The course was very enjoyable despite all this, and I caught Anders Skarholt (a top Norwegian junior) about half way round. He then missed out number 13. I caught him up again at 15, but then a series of small incidents proceeded to ruin my chance of victory. Following him out of the control towards 16, we were passing a small group of people. He managed to get in front of them before climbing over the spur to the control, while I had to wait a couple of seconds. Then in my haste I waved my emit at the unit, and on checking it as I left the control, I noticed that it had not punched. Then I had to run back and punch again (I was 12 seconds down on a 15 second leg). So after that I was chasing again, and I decided to take the right route round the building, rather than the left route that Skarholt was taking. I think his route was a couple of seconds quicker, and I had no chance to catch him.

When I crossed the line I was 2 seconds off the lead, but looking at the splits, at number 15 I was more than 15 seconds in the lead. Hmmm. Never mind, still a good result and almost a good race. Beat Jorgen Rostrup by 1 second. Still running well before tio and EOC.

Results here
Splits here
Report in Norwegian here