orienteering race (SA Long Champs) 1:45:16 [3] 9.7 km (10:51 / km)
(injured) shoes: Inov8 Oroc spikes
Hmmm. Orienteering is so much worse for my knees than straight running. From the start I was moving pretty slowly, even more so on the (steep) descents than on the hills. And I overshot 1 by a couple of minutes (read the green in the gullies wrongly) so that by the time I got there Fern was there too. She was up the next hill pretty quickly, although not out of sight for a couple more controls because it was so open. Bridget passed me at 3, which I faffed around a bit on, but I didn't lose sight of her until 7. After which I had to sit down and remove my shoe to extricate an acacia prickle from my smallest toe. Then I plodded on trying to enjoy the scenery and not think about the pain in my legs, or the gratuitious nature of so many doglegs. I realise that there are a lot of fences at Tanunda Creek (Barossa Range) and so it's hard to make long route choice legs, but I would have been ashamed to serve up such a course as we had today. Very nearly headed straight for the (remote, and not advertised as such) finish from 19 when I saw the sequence of 8 doglegs still to go, down and up the hillside. But I stuck it out, and saw Fern in the distance for the last few controls, not that I was getting any closer. I mean, her dad was beating me down hills!
Knees got even worse after I finished. Obviously, if they had been that bad before I started then I wouldn't have gone out. And when I opened my copy of the SA Orienteer and realised that yet again my (time-sensitive) contribution hadn't been printed, that very nearly negated any sense of satisfaction with the weekend! But it was a lovely day, and nice to catch up with people. Good win by Lauren too, on the back of a 26km run yesterday :)