Running warm up/down 20:00 [3]
shoes: VJ Bold 2011
Warm up straight up the hill to the top of the map. For some reason i ran the whole way...
Orienteering 1:17:30 [4]
Some days I love this sport, like yesterday. Others I find myself wondering why I do it, like parts of today.
Got a sign of things to come in the first 20m from the start - thick spiky undergrowth! Managed 1 and 2 OK, then slow to 3 making sure I read off features along the way.
...then 4. Decided to guts it up the hill and bounce off the hill top/track then back into the control...bad idea. So many rocks! and in thick scrubby stuff. Checked sooo many rocks, then eventually popped out to the clearing below the control, which I'd purposefully avoided cos I didn't trust the mapping of the clearings. And sure enough, the clearing was double the size as on the map, and the control was calmly hanging out on the edge of it! So dropped 5 mins on the control compared to those who went straight to the clearing first up.
Let no.4 piss me off and as a result made a mess of my route to 6, going straight over the hill rather than around as I planned. Good sign of my fitness that I got to the top without noticing that's what I was doing i spose? Dropped another 3mins on Grace here, so 8 minutes down and just having a shite time of it really.
Decided to start afresh from 6, and got 7 cleanly while planning my long leg to 8...up and over the saddle and down the long, admittedly green striped, reentrant (sorry, gully). Mmm. Yeah. Got competely stuck in green, over head high, spiky, scrub. Emerged 10mins later, hating life.
Lucky for the sake of all who shared my company later in the day, the course then got a lot more runnable and I could turn on a bit of actual running speed. Clean enough through to the last few controls then.
3rd to last control refused to beep at me (i'd been turning all the controls on, but this one took aaaaages). So I clipped my map, then tried again - and it beeped straight away! Garr! Exited the wrong way, dropping 30s on the next control.
And then my master stroke on a brilliant day - followed the tapes from the last control, only to find myself at the penultimate control of the blue course...neat little 180 mistake, lucky it wasn't in view of anyone! So my finish split is 6xlonger than anyone elses...
Crap race from me, and area far more overgrown than mapped. But everyone had to deal with the same thing.
And now my body is covered in 1000 scratches and spotted with 100 thorns. Which drew plenty of comments at soccer