Run race ((orienteering)) 39:50 [3] *** 4.0 km (9:58 / km) +250m 7:35 / km
spiked:11/14c
Many visitors to Fatima go in search of miracle cures for the sick and the lame, but going there en route to the event didn't seem to help me much in either department (the absence of any relevant prayers may or may not have had something to do with this). The positive was getting out into the terrain, and it was mostly the sort of terrain which should have been enjoyable, but I was running too weakly to really be able to appreciate it. A couple of minor navigational time losses, 30 seconds at 10 (didn't read the description) and 15 at 11, but my biggest time loss was getting stuck in brambles (of which there seemed to be considerably more on the ground than on the map) on the way to 9 - perhaps a minute or so.
Ended up about halfway down the field, which was probably better than my run deserved. Eric Perrin (sometime French national team member in the BG era) won with 25. Alain Berger started 12 minutes behind me and given the run I was having I expected him to go through me, but I saw him running in the opposite direction when going through 10. This appeared to be an extremely creative route choice and so it proved, leaving him 6 minutes off the pace (he's also carrying an injury).
In a lot of ways this was very much like the more open Australian granite areas - the rock combined with occasional areas of brambles reminded me of Tharwa Tor, although the slabbiness of the rock was perhaps a bit more WA-like. Control placements tended not to use the full complexity of the rock, though. One feature we don't have in Australia is stone walls, some of which were pretty nasty to get across because they had (generally rickety) barbed wire fences on one or both sides.
(Another feature we don't have in Australia is the defunct bullring next to the arena. I get the impression that bullfighting as a sport is very much in decline, but it still exists because later in the day I saw posters advertising a fight in a couple of weeks).
One bit of good news is that the hamstring got through its first terrain test with only slight twinges.