Orienteering race 27:10 [4] *** 2.4 km (11:19 / km)
20c shoes: Adrenaline 14
WPFG Sprint, Red course. Thanks, Keg and Valerie, for letting us run this and last Sunday's course after the competitive race. This was the first event on Tom Strat's new map of the GMU campus. Addie and I got there just after the rain had stopped. I took the last pre-sealed red map and went right out, while Addie waited a couple of minutes for Valerie to scrounge up another map.
Keg designed a fine course, lots of route choice and plenty of opportunities to get yourself dead-ended. It took me the whole of the first leg to get into the map scale, going pretty slowly. After that I ran well except for one big disaster on #11. At least I had anticipated the difficulties and was trying to work out a way around them, but it involved starting out running in the opposite direction, and that made me turn left instead of right, and when I realized the problem I tried to keep going on the left-hand route instead of immediately turning back. So, a 5-minute leg.
Good fun, and the general consensus was that we (the club) need to do more campus sprints like this.
By the end of the course my glasses had fogged and sweated up, and so had my magnifier. In the dark post-rainstorm conditions I could barely read the map at all through two glass layers, even when they were clean. I'm thinking I need to try contact lenses.