Training Log Archive: jennycas

60 minute score, starting @0730 before it got too hot. Everyone headed for straight for the rocky knoll just near the car park and I had to wait in the queue to punch. Stopped to hang one flag back up, and made a couple of small overshoots on controls (something about a 1: 6 000 map) but got through the northern - more open - half of the course in less than half an hour and started to get excited, thinking that maybe I could get them all inside the time limit. Was a bit inaccurate heading up a rocky hillside looking for a rockface beyond some bare rock, when suddenly Susanne appeared out of nowhere and I couldn't get away from her over the next few controls!

We'd take different routes then converge on the control; I could run faster where it was open but she could mountain-goat lightfootedly through the rocky stuff while I was rather too tentative. Every time I pulled away, I'd turn around to see her coming up behind me...and then I made a massive mistake with only 2 controls to go. The last couple were just over the other side of the Todd River, and I needed to head just soouth of east out of the hills, but couldn't seem to stick to my bearing, got dragged SE by a creekline which I really should have crossed, and ended up hitting the 'river' about 300m south of where I should have been :(

So the race was lost, but to add insult to injury I then couldn't find the next control I was looking for. A flat slab of concrete in long grass, just north of a creek junction or so the map said, but it definitely wasn't right there and after a couple of min I started to get worried about being late back so cut my losses, feeling rather sad (in Eleanor-speak). A restorative iced coffee from the Telegraph station refreshed me enough to go control collecting (S&L and I tag-teamed with minding the kidlets) whereupon I discovered that the control feature was actually about 30m north of where it's mapped and on the opposite side of a clump of trees which I'd never looked beyond. Oh well, should have been thinking like a Territorian.

I'm not good with score events or with night O so juxtaposing them is generally a bad idea, and the familial cold's finally settled on me after 2 days of saw froat so my head was fairly spaced out, but OTOH Uncle Geoffrey (who flew in @midday) was available for kid-wrangling, so Susanne & Lachlan & I could all run on Manu's brand new map of the Alice Springs Golf Course :)

Start was @the golf club, and I ruled out going to a nearby control first because I thought the fence behind it was impassable, so from the start my route was suboptimal because I'd have to double back for it later on. Ran as hard as I could though, and was around quite a few guys even after I'd mistaken negative contours for a low sandhill and in fact climbed a bigger hill unnecessarily when I should have been looking in a basin, and compounded the error by thinking that the blue filled-in circle which the control was on would be a tank when in fact it's a pond...

Anyway, that was a small issue compared to what I did later on - with only 2 controls to go and needing to head west to a drainage channel, managed instead to read that I was still at my previous control and headed south instead, hitting a fence, being unable to find it on the map because it was just off the bottom edge of the mapped area (Manu, don't laugh, yes I did run off your map!) and spent 5 minutes in no-man's land, getting confused because the building lights I could see to the west didn't seem to be those of the Doubletree Hilton (in fact I was as far south as the casino - oops) and getting a bit freaked out by a 4WD driving around among the mullock heaps.

Anyway, eventually corrected by heading north, and still got all 20 controls within the 45 min time limit, but was pretty embarrassed, especially when I found out that the 3rd-placed woman (a local, so maybe she was more familiar with the golf course?) was only a few seconds behind me. Had been a bit disillusioned with silver medals, but bronze would have been so much more humiliating. I just don't seem to have orienteered well at all this year, even at WMOC. Presentations were held inside the golf clubrooms where we could order dinner, and Susanne had to get all dressed up in her fancy ASMG ambassador's uniform to present the medals, and Eleanor told mummy she looked beautiful. A fitting end to a great sequence of races and some incredibly hard work by Kay. Now I'm on holidays?

C • holidays.. 4