orienteering race (Easter long) 1:32:14 [4] 7.2 km (12:49 / km)
shoes: Inov8 Oroc spikes
So, 7.2km wasn't really far enough for a classic length race even if it was on Mt Alexander. (And I suspect the advertised 350m climb was a typo as other similar courses had more like 250m?) But it was a course that made good use of the available area, even if the phi loops possibly contributed to, rather than prevented, bunching...anyway, really nice morning, course and terrain - a lot like Mt Beckworth but not as hot as a month ago!
I was probably foolish to take the high route and drop (what seemed like quite a way) into the first couple of controls, and Al Jones had caught me 2 min at number 2 already. Natasha came through me (4 min) at 3, where I was looking on a rockface too low (which I now can't see on the map unless it's rocky ground) and they were both a fair way ahead of me going up the hill to 5 which was the first of our common controls for the loops, but then they were both punching it as I came in, so must have fluffed it a bit. Natasha and I both had the downhill side of the loop first and both lost time going into the next control, but when we got to the common control at the bottom of the loop there was Al coming in from doing the straight line down the middle of the loop, so she must have lost time too. They were ahead of me on the uphill side of the loop and I blew the control at the end of it by being on some patchy open just lower than the clearing I wanted, and looking for a boulder on the edge of it. Then I saw Al and Tash coming down from above and realised I was too low, so went up to the proper clearing and they went back up too - I thought they'd already found the control but they hadn't.
I got the common control ahead of them and then took the straight line south, seeing Susanne hooning through the forest parallel to me. Actually it wasn't straight south; we both climbed a bit, passing control 9 we'd been to already, and then dropped in to it. She was out of sight fairly quickly after that. The longer legs across the hillside were clean for me although fairly slow, and it took until the end of the long leg for Natasha to catch up to me again. She was over the hill pretty fast though. I guess I need to do rather more hill-and-terrain work. But that's okay; I am still at the point of being happy that I can run fairly pain-free :) And I could have cut out about 5 min of mistakes; think my goal ought to be being able to get back to about 20 min behind the winner, as I was in Hanny's glory days, rather than 30 min as I currently am behind Lizzie.