Training Log Archive: jennycas

To the far end of the Merridee map to bring back a few controls after the OY event was all over. As far as I can tell, people liked Fern's & my courses and the event went pretty well (I spent 3 hours on the start, and only one person got really lost following my pink tapes 1.5km up the hill to get there). We ran out of maps on course 4 (M55 and M65) but the registration had presence of mind to recycle them. Tyson was wonderful helping me & Fern put out the controls, he can be a Wallaringan any time he wants to....

It was nice that so many orienteers came and camped in the mallee, and sat around the campfire and shared the communal YA/WA supper. Oh, and it was particularly nice that they sang Happy Birthday for my benefit. This made me feel a little better about the fact that my birthday is now bookended, so to speak, by the deaths of grandmothers. Very glad that this week is over.

Slugs are sluggish. So was I. Counting didn't help - I think the pool has been lengthened in the last week. Either that or I've got shorter.

Attack of the Killer Physio
I felt less worse after this, because my neck/back/shoulders were no longer quite so rigid (hire-car syndrome).

Poor John, he has a sprained ankle. Poor Bridget, she turned up but her running shoes didn't. Poor Fern, she has so much study to do that she & Tyson made only a brief appearance. Zara/Lauren/Simon & I did the usual Lower waterfall, across Jubilee Drive, down the steps, back along the creek loop. I probably wouldn't have run at all if there weren't other people involved, but I'm glad I did. Feeling very flat this week, but at least now I am better oxygenated.

C • We had pizza instead... 2

Family commitments. Also, my brain is so full that any non-essential jolting of its contents might cause something important to fall out and drift away unremembered. On the bright side, my 4th year student who will be with me on placement for the next month is really good; my colleagues are envious. (Mostly I get lucky but we have had some shockers over the years.)

Processed all the entries for this weekend's events and spent quality time at OASA management meeting. Now all I have to do is re-number the SI units and get the Merridee maps printed...

C • Remebering 1

Monday night run from Tyson's at Glenalta, through Hawthorndene and back, with Lauren (showing no effects from her 1:27 half on Sunday), Tyson, Fern & Simon. My legs felt fine but my brain is about to go into meltdown, I am so tired - and it's only Monday!

I'm seriously surprised that there wasn't someone in the organising club with the sort of sense of humour that would rename this map "Orienteers' Despair". The pine forest in the assembly area looked so flat and innocuous that it was hard to realise that there would be tough scrub and sandstone valleys just below us, but at least I knew this was coming. What I didn't expect was that, quite frankly, the map itself would be a crock of shit! Not so much the mapping or cartography (though apparently the brown lines in the pine forest were meant to be linear logpiles) - but the print quality, which was woeful. Everything was fuzzily pixellated.

As I ran into the native forest I was seething at the sheer illegibility of the map, because I couldn't read what would be a cliff which I was going to do my best not to fall down. Then I seethed some more at having to pass straight by the mouth of a small canyon in order to find the right cliff. Okay, so maybe it wasn't that dangerous and I'm just a complete chicken when it comes to heights or drops, but how would the older non-elite types have felt about it? I was still stewing about this when I over-ran 4 and when I came back to the right gully and read that my control description was a boulder I thought they must have got this wrong because there was no boulder on the map! Closer inspection revealed that all the boulders had printed at rocky ground symbol size :(

Finally I simmered down and figured that I had to work with what I'd been given, otherwise I would never get around the course. I also decided that taking the long way around on each leg was the safest option for my sanity, as mini-gorges just seemed to appear and drop away out of nowhere. I was lucky on 7 to see the control straight away even though it wasn't on the same rockface as the one in the centre of the circle, then at 8 Mace caught me 2 min and we both stuffed this one up. It wasn't on the right rockface, but actually I was too far west when I started looking for it and then went further west when I needed to go back east. Finally saw some boys coming out of it but still took a while to track the control down.

Took the road to 9, climbed left and hit the road on 10 ( between the invisible highpoints because they also had printed at rocky ground size) because I didn't trust being able to find the lower singletrack (apparently it was fine), coming up out of 11 Mace was still looking for it, I never saw her again after that and I never saw any other girls either, except that as I came towards the spectator control I saw Susanne punching the last control and I was so envious of her because she was getting to finish and I still had another half-hour to go.

The last loop was okay but pretty rough going. My control descriptions had entirely sweated into squid ink by then so I misread another invisible high point as a gully on the second last control. I didn't feel that I was flagging too badly but I was surprised to finish and find that I'd been out for 2:10. I hadn't realised that I was slowing down so much but Susanne commented that maybe I had stopped attacking the forest about halfway round. Looking at my splinter collection, I'd say that the forest had started fighting back!

We watched John & Lachlan go through the spectator control within a minute of each other, then when Lachlan finished and we said "have you seen John?" he said "I think John fell off a cliff on the way to the second-last control, I heard him yell!" So Simon & I went out there for a quick look at the topography - in case John was at the bottom of it - and when we came back we were relieved to see him sitting at the finish with his ankle in a bucket of ice.

C • Yelling 9