orienteering race (Miners Despair Long) 2:10:13 [4] 9.9 km (13:09 / km)
shoes: new Olways
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.