Orienteering (WA Sprint Champs) 16:35 [5] 4.0 km (4:09 / km)
shoes: x talon 190.2
A bit hesitant on the first for no reason other than seeing people run away out of it in the wrong direction, 2 came up really early and that jolted me back into 1:5000 scale. Felt rusty and very stop start, but knew that I was moving OK between the controls. Slightly poor route to 5, felt much smoother from about 7 through to 12, but having that one moved slightly led to a changed route as I stepped back out onto the path and I struggled through the short direction changing legs to 15, where I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and had a little think before running the last 5 metres to the control.
Like many I was a bit thrown by the SI box gone from 17, not finding reserve boxes on the map, then trying not to spike my fingers as I impaled a corner of the map on what was left on the punch. Took a while to find myself on the map again as I wandered across the bridge towards 18. Pretty clean through to the third last, where I took a few steps down the path, decided I couldn't get through that way, backtracked and went around, when I could have just continued on :(
I had felt like I wasn't pushing hard enough, but was getting pretty knackered by the end, and I couldn't have pushed harder and stayed in control of the navigation. It all went a fair bit better than I had been expecting given my complete lack of navigation for 11 months, and was good enough for the win.
Not a super complex area, but interesting, and fun to run a sprint with some bush and park and less buildings. Thanks for the new map Juffy and the twisty course setting Graham. Not sure I will repeat a 900km round trip to run for that long again, but glad I did it this time.
Distance is a guess. I thought about using the GPS, but didn't want to think about starting a watch or having a distraction if things went really wrong.