orienteering race (headless chickening) 48:52 [3] 4.6 km (10:37 / km)
shoes: new Olways
Vic Middle Champs, Spring Gully. As I told Blair, I did bad things to his perfectly good course. I have no excuses to make; I'm just glad that neither Susanne nor Kay was there to tell me what they thought of my efforts to deconstruct it!
Nearly over-ran the first control but looked to my right and saw it so dropped in. Then dropped 2 minutes on the second, a leg so short that the circles were touching. I ran almost the right distance in the right direction, pulled up short confused by the blackberries and couldn't see a gully which might hold a control, thought I must be on the knoll further north with green marked, but I could look back and see the control I had come from, ran SE to another control, back to my first to relocate off it, took the bearing again for the 3rd time and it still led me to the blackberry thicket, so I finally went beyond it and what do you know, there was a gully with a control in it!
Was mostly okay through the middle of the course except for dropping too low on 5 (misread the white/yellow boundary), caught Fern at 8 which was another little gully but bigger than expected so I briefly refused to drop into it despite seeing a control at the bottom, hesitated too close to the creek on the knoll at 11 while she was smart enough to climb the extra contour, Vanessa passed both of us at 12. I was really struggling with my ankle being painful and this was messing with my concentration, such as it was, and I managed to read the wrong control number at 15 and nearly went away again, but I saved my dumbest moment for right at the end.
Okay, so the control descriptions were too long for my holder and I had folded the last control under. No big deal, it's easy to remember that the last control is 100. It's also easy, when you're at control 19 of 21 and you look at your arm to see that "there's only one control left", to then take out your brain and throw it away and proceed to do the incredibly short leg from 20 to 21, except that I was starting from 19! And so I did laps of a couple of knolls immediately NE of 19 and couldn't find the control and couldn't understand why not. I could look at the control I'd just come from, and I even went back for a closer look twice, but it was only on the 3rd try when I got close enough to read the number that I realised what I was doing. Not even stopping to curse myself, I raced off in the rough direction of 20 and wasted another minute being too far left...
Yep, so I threw away, at a conservative estimate, at least 8 minutes on this course. I did, however, learn one thing today: that a piece of gooey chocolate cake, no matter how undeserved, when accompanied by ice cream and washed down by decent coffee, can make you feel a lot better!