Saturday 28 May 2011

28 May 2011 - Lasham Regionals Day 1

One of the pre-requisites for the Women’s World Gliding Championships was for the women to take part in some form of training or a competition.  Three of the other ladies had just completed a Women’s Gliding Nationals in France and I’m now sitting at Lasham in Hampshire in order to take part in the Regional there.

The weather, having been pretty reasonable over the last couple of weeks, now finds us with a cold front slowly moving across the South of the country.  With a cloud base of around 1000 feet, it didn’t look too hopeful.  The competition briefed the pilots and decided to hold us on site until at least 14:00 to see if the weather would improve. 

I was invited to join Pete Masson briefing the Junior Pilots in preparation for their World Championships to be held in Germany this year.  The training was all about preparation for Assigned Area Tasks (AAT).  Most competitions set clearly defined turning points that you have to fly around in the prescribed order.  An AAT is another form of task whereby large sectors or radii are set at the turn point and an amount of time is set e.g. 2.5, 3 or 3.5 hours.  The pilot needs to decide for himself how far into each sector he thinks he can fly before turning and heading to the next sector.  The aim is to cover as much distance as possible and arrive back to site just after the prescribed amount of time – not easy.  It was great to get some clear planning points for these tricky tasks.

The competition day was finally scrubbed by Lasham just before 15:00.  We finished up our training session by 16:15 which was great as this gave me some time to myself as Steve took Michael back home. 
I took the opportunity to eat a snack and then got changed into my running gear.  I have recently taken up running (jogging more like in my case) with some of my colleagues at work and having not had the time to run last week, I was keen to get back into the stride.  What people may not realise about me, is that if I decide to do something, I will do it.  So, although never having run before in my life, I am determined to reach some personal goals that I’ve set.  Lasham is the perfect place to run (when no flying is taking place).  So on with the running gear and out with the dog (Django)…not sure that he was too impressed as he’s definitely over-weight and it was the first time he’s done this!  I really enjoyed it, even though a fair proportion of the run was into a pretty strong wind.  I ran about a third of the way around Lasham’s peri-track and back to the tent (we are camping on site).  I’m not sure how far that was, but will check it out in the car at some point in the week (probably tomorrow as the weather looks poor again).  I hope to be able to run around the whole peri-track by the end of the week….we shall see.  There are good shower facilities at Lasham which make it more enjoyable. 

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