orienteering race (O-Ringen Day 1) 1:26:06 [3] 5.3 km (16:15 / km)
shoes: Inov8 Oroc spikes
It felt a bit like cheating to get a lift to such an iconic event in a car, but it was with the Radfords, who were reminiscing about all of the O-Ringens they've been to, including some in the '70s*, so this little O-Ringen virgin listened as hard as she could. But in the end it was just another race, although some of the cliches held true, such as people coming up to you in the forest demanding to know where they were (about 500m away from where they thought they were, heh heh heh). Possibly because I had one of the latest starts, after 1pm, the arena didn't seem that busy - not sure what the official numbers are but it seemed to me like *only* a few thousand people - and although it was cool to run down the finish chute in the lane matching the sponsor on my chest number, hardly anyone else was finishing at the same time so it seemed a bit of an anticlimax after having heard so much about O-Ringen for so many years.
Today's terrain was described as having a "distinct wilderness feeling" and although I probably wouldn't have wanted to rogaine around it for 24 hrs, I thought it was lovely forest, not unlike Rocky Paddock in parts, with such soft moss that I didn't have to fear doing an ankle, and subtle contours with occasional big rocks. Oh, and marshes. Possibly I was too tentative because of all that I've heard about people losing their shoes therein, but I took the long way around wherever possible, and in hindsight I think that by going more directly I could have saved between 5 and 10 min.
Something important which I learned today is that most of what is mapped as marsh is in fact in white, i.e. still under tree cover, and is generally not that bad to get through. And I'd already figured that today was primarily about working out how to do it better over the next 4 days. Towards the end I was getting super-hungry and a bit vague and made a daft error where I misread a line of cliffs and got excited about seeing a control, charged towards it saying "that cliff's way bigger than the 1.5m on the control descriptions". Of course it was, it was the wrong bloody cliff, and I took a few minutes to work out that I was too high not too low.
Without that I'd have been closer to 80 mins and closer to my preliminary goal of being halfway down the field (40th is more like 2/3 of the way down; would hate to be in a class with 150+ people). A really good run for me, if I could manage to be aggressive with the forest, might hypothetically be not much over 70; only the top 3 W40s broke 10-minute km today. My secondary goal is now to see whether I can manage to remain ahead of all 4 of the women from West Yorkshire!
*edit: apparently Tony Radford attended his first O-Ringen in 1969!