Ahh night runs , how I love to hate them. I have generally not had the best of luck when it comes to night runs, so it was a welcomed experiance to make it to the end of the FitCal Country Club Night Trail Run (try saying that three times fast) without any serious injuries and only a smattering of annoyances. Before the race I managed to lose my headlamp (I still have no idea what happened to it since I use it almost weekly) and it felt like somone dropped a small lake on the area during the day, which makes trail running a trickier for me (I was also considering ditching when it didnt seem the rain would stop). I had also encountered issues with the original sign up process where I never recieved the confirmation email from the site, considering this seemed to be their first event and their response was fairly prompt I wasn’t overly worried about pitching up and being turned away. It was also a little odd that they didnt handle the payment on registration for the race, rather it happened on the day of the race.
Organization and generic issues
I hate to admit this but the organization left me a little wanting. While directions were provided online it would have helped to have a sign post or two to ensure people were directed easily. The payment for the race was a little weird as well, signups were handled by providing your name/surname and you were handed your race number (which is all good), but after this you chose to pay by card or cash, except no one seemed to be monitoring this and it seemed that it was totally up to the honesty of the runner to pay.
Overall
Overall the event was as good as I could have hoped for, having set a personal best time (even though none of the non champion chip users times were recorded), I am happy that my recent training has paid off. This was also one of the few races where it was small enough that it felt as if you could chat to just about everyone and generally felt more relaxed than many other races I have attended. In closing, I do wish that I could run the course in the day, but I imagine that might cause issues for the people that use the course to actually play golf.