Run ((orienteering)) 34:50 [3] *** 4.3 km (8:06 / km) +20m 7:55 / km
spiked:14/15c
My first experience of orienteering in China. This was the first event of the regional series for the year (so I guess you could call it an approximate State League equivalent) - a 2-person relay for the elites/18s and an individual event for everyone else, using what I'd describe as a long urban format, mostly in a village but with transport legs early and late to get us to/from the arena.
I ran one of the M21 relay legs about 20 minutes after the mass start. It was quickly apparent that this was not going to be your usual urban race in the western world, featuring (among other things) horn-blowing scooters, wandering roosters, and eventually a grazing ox in the vicinity of the 10th control. I was looking forward to a village race after what I'd seen of a similar area on Thursday. The first part of the course was fairly simple (I think the principal purpose of #3 was to take us to the southernmost point of mainland China's southernmost village - the actual southernmost point of mainland China is a couple of kilometres away), but it got steadily more complex, culminating in a long leg 11-12 which, once you read it properly, only had a couple of route choice options, but was fiendishly difficult to try to execute at speed through the maze. Managed this OK, but by then I was fading in the high humidity - 29/25 today, numbers which wouldn't be out of place in Darwin in February, and the first sunshine since I've been here - and the long run-in to the finish was definitely a struggle. I would have had trouble if it were even 5-10 minutes more; the amount of fluid lost was evidenced by the fact it was 8 hours (and about 3 litres of fluid) later before anything came out the other end (just as well I didn't have to do a drug test). Fastest relay leg time I saw was 30 so the actual result was quite respectable.
This takes my number of countries orienteered in to either 29 or 30, depending on how you count Northern Ireland (which for sporting purposes effectively has "dual nationality"; I haven't competed in the Republic). Probably won't collect another one for a while (maybe WMOC 2020 in Slovakia, unless I manage to get to a Hong Kong event at some stage on a World Cup trip?). Most significant omissions, apart from Slovakia, are probably Estonia, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
The arena set-up removed any possible doubt that the organisers are capable of putting on a good arena show. I doubt if too many State League events in Australia feature a 20-metre-long big screen or a half-hour opening ceremony (opening ceremonies are important in this part of the world). Got to give out some pineapples at the prizegiving...
I was a bit nervous about whether we had enough time to get back to Zhanjiang for the flight. There are advantages of travelling back on a bus with, among others, Guangdong's deputy minister of sport: the police will stop the traffic for you. (The bus driver wasn't as crazy as Friday's, either). Something new I learned about Zhanjiang (with some Wikipediaing once I got back to Australia) is that it was once a French equivalent of Hong Kong; unlike the British or the Portuguese, the French, who had more than enough on their hands in Vietnam, didn't reclaim their possession after it was liberated from the Japanese at the end of World War 2, and it was formally handed over to China in 1946.