The Original Mountain Marathon 2016 — 'Bog Bashing'
'Running' perhaps isn't the only adjective that should be used to describe taking on last weekend's OMM in the Galloway Mountains, Scotland. You should also add 'Climbing', 'Scrambling', 'Hiking', and most definitely 'Bog Bashing' to the list; it is a running orienteering event of pretty extreme proportions... Friday saw us drive from Portsmouth to the Galloway peninsula in South West Scotland—a casual 15 hour journey by minibus, picking up my running partner Ben in Penrith. Welcomed at midnight by the cheery OMM team, we settled down for a few hours sleep not sure what to anticipate from the next day's race. The OMM is a run orienteering event series, with events in the U.K, France and even Japan. The events all hold the same format: on the start line teams are given a list of checkpoints out in the mountain wilderness—each one is worth a different number of 'points'. The teams of two then have to visit as many of those...