orienteering race (Rowdy Flat middle) 59:28 [3] 3.4 km (17:29 / km)
shoes: Inov8 X-Talon
Rowdy Flat isn't the most readable of maps, and when you get a print where the purple of the circles isn't that easy to distinguish from the brown of the contours, it makes for a lot of stopping to try to read where you've come from and where you're going to, not that I was moving very fast when I was moving. It really wasn't necessary for the organisers to impose a pre-start quarantine on the elites because the courses were so convoluted that nobody could have shown anyone else anything of benefit on the maps which were displayed at the finish.
I overran a track junction on the way to 1, came at 2 from below because the description said foot of a 6m cliff (but it really wasn't so then I had to scramble back up) and was generally very tentative getting in and out of gullies, also still pretty low on energy from last week's cold. Sometimes features seemed to take a long time to come up and at other times, like on 5 where I was expecting to see a boulder beside the track, I somehow ran an extra 100m and had to double back. Lost most time on 10 though I think, where I was so sure I had crossed the creek at the junction and gone up between the branches but it turned out I had gone one too far over; I wasn't alone in this but was slower on the uptake than most.
Lost about 8 mins on mistakes and quite possibly my lack of running speed accounted for about the same, but who's to say? Great run by Jas to win, anyway.
The Arrows stayed at the Old Priory that night and I'm fairly certain I managed to pick the same bed as I had when staying there with the schools' team in 1992. Wouldn't be surprised if it was the same mattress as 22 years ago also - damn uncomfortable.