Quote Originally Posted by mr brightside View Post
Strava? I don't have that.

Anyway, I've seen most of the gorse patches on Robinson now, I should have taken a peris-pooter with me and collected some bug specimens for the children to examine, I was moving so slowly I'd have had the time. At the stile there were a wide variety of lines being taken, some very westerly, so I was confident of finding a route. I stayed close to the fence for a bit and decided to try the path alongside it, but it was awful. Loose and rocky with sharp blade like sections of bedding plane sticking up, your studs would just slip down the grooves and you'd go flying. I left the path onto some spongy stuff and identified some people in front who were staying right, I went left having spotted a nice grassy chute which I hoped was one of the gullies. It just led me into a thicket of crags and gorse; there were old gorse branches everywhere and a trip would have resulted in severe pain. I just had to negotiate it at walk and try and find a way out. I got through it only to find d myself in tall heather, but found a sheep trod over to the right which led me back to the race route. I went round to the right of the junior turn, which was a straighter line, only to find more gorse and crags. There was a guy on my tail by this point, having gone the right way he'd caught me up and the two I'd seen further up were having cake in the shed. I decided not to charge through the dead bracken as my pursuer chose to do, and stuck to a route I'd chosen earlier. This was my only good line of the race and after I'd knocked a notch on over the pasture to the finish the other guy was miles away. My calves died on the way up and my quads on the way down, so not a very strong race. The course is great though, a real gem of a race, good terrain and route choices are wide open, I'll have to come back to do it properly.
On the race website route map, under the yellow, there is a path going off left (on the descent) roughly halfway down from Checkpoint 1/stile to Kirk Close - there is a very similar "hot" line on Strava global heat map - is this way down not viable? It would seem many people use it, though not necessarily in the race.