orienteering race (Pewsey Vale) 1:37:13 [3] 8.3 km (11:43 / km)
shoes: Inov8 Oroc spikes
The course was never going to be short and sweet, being Pewsey Vale, but I thought Stephen Dose had set good legs which required navigation (25 of them) without making the control sites too complicated; in fact some of the flags were visible from quite some distance off. The only ones which I had trouble with were where the control site was wrong/weird (12 and 21) and on 8 - where I was following the fenceline north, looking for a fence junction just past the dam before turning off into the bush, but the fence junction turned out to be mapped 100m too far north and I then ended up well beyond the saddle I wanted to be on and lost about 3 min. This may explain the apparent distance anomaly which is always present in the SE native scrub section of the original map - possibly it's been stretched or shrunk when the extra farmland was mapped for 2002?
Legs felt fairly good for the first half and were even lifting me okay over junk on the ground, but I started to fade when I got to the far end of the map and it didn't help that I put my foot in a hole, jarring my hamstring, so was pretty slow on hills afterwards, and not particularly enthused by the final southern loop, but at least controls 22 and 23 hadn't been brought in yet (unlike in the men's race at the World Cup in Spain...)