orienteering race (SA middle dist champs) 38:05 [4] 5.1 km (7:28 / km)
shoes: Asics GT-2000
We left camp at 8am to put out the rest of the controls, hoping that tomorrow should be an equally crisp morning for the competitors. They'll have to walk over a km from the parking but the nice sheltered assembly area is worth it. And the map-change clothesline looks pretty professional. All this was done well in time to get to the afternoon's event, the one which nearly didn't happen and had been pulled together over the past 5 days by Bob & Gil (emailing the map files back to the printer's from Wilpena). I was looking forward to the intricate little hills of Mannawarra but in fact much of this course was in some quite subtle vague stuff and I kept bearing too far to the right which probably lost me small amounts of time on a number of legs although I was running quite well by my standards, and definitely enjoying it.
When I came to the misplaced control though, my heart just sank; so near and yet so far. Less than 50m away from where it should have been but in a little side gully at right angles to the one where it was meant to be - damn! I initially thought this had resulted from a transcription error between draft courses and final print but found out afterwards that it was a placement mistake made by both course planner and controller who had approached, late in the day and weary, from the opposite direction to which most of the competitors would be coming, and found a little hanging valley without checking which way it ran. As I ran away having lost less than a minute, all I could think for the rest of the course was that I really really hoped no one would put in a complaint which could lead to a protest that might force cancellation of the event. It was obviously a control which was on nearly all of the hard courses and I was perfectly certain that the organisers wouldn't be voluntarily offering to cancel the results, because then they wouldn't have an event and we'd be back in the same position where we'd been a week ago.