orienteering 1:32:50 [5] 11.54 km (8:03 / km) +434m 6:46 / km
Orienteering at the foot of the glacier day! A longish course in cool unique terrain. The first half was on a shelf of bare rock with lots of tiny cliffs and ponds and gorgeous views. The second half of the course was on a muddy floodplain thing, with long patches of snow and soggy footing.
My worst day of orienteering so far this week. I was clean to the first, taking a roundabout route that was very secure, and I saw Jonas coming down to the second, though we both missed the little spur. I was too high on 3, and Jonas caught up on the way down to 5, we clearly were not doing each other any favors and I dragged him off course to 6, where we split ways. I overran 7, and didn't see Jonas again.
I just didn't get the hang of the scale, and was overrunning everything. Lost time on 9, and then swung super wide on my way across to 10, already feeling a bit dark about all the mistakes that I had been making, I was further frustrated with small bobbles on 13 and 14.
Giant error on 17, very confident coming across the hillside, marking off cliffs, right up until a snow field and when I popped out on the other side of the patch of snow, nothing seemed to make sense, I tried to orient myself of the nearby features, but I simply could not believe that I was as high as I turned out to be. It took a lot of relocating up high to finally make sense of it.
The rest of the course was a fairly open loop felt like a slog without much to do except keep the head up.
Hoping for a better feeling on the last day, tomorrow.
Trail run 1:47:25 [3] 15.59 km (6:53 / km) +320m 6:15 / km
Not such a great day orienteering, so I wanted to go for a run and change my mood a bit. Swung out along our route from the rest day, over to Schwarzsee and then wiggled down towards Furi on the switchbacks. All absolutely wonderful trails. Got a call from a coworker in the lab halfway down, which really helped put things in perspective :) The mice are all fine, no need to worry :)
I really wanted to pick a trail that would let me finish up the run by going over the suspension bridge up in the valley, and I took a couple of forays on small trails that looked like they might be going in the right direction. At the bottom of the steep section I finally found the sign for the the bridge, and so I resigned myself to a little bit more uphill running so that I could check off the bridge from my list :)
Then it was roads the whole way home. Turns out that the gondolas had trouble today, so I ended up beating the ladies back to the apartment.
Feeling much better after a little mountain therapy.