Orienteering race (NOL 2 (Middle)) 28:40 [5] 6.0 km (4:47 / km)
shoes: Inov8 oroc 280
Surface Hill - 3rd place, 11secs behind Simon, 6secs behind Shep (at the time I thought that this was tight racing). Quality goldmining terrain - a bit like the deciduous, mine-workingy bits of the Forest of Dean or Leith Hill, so certainly not alien to me.
Did a decent warm-up to shake off the morning race and rocked up at the start to find out that they'd cocked the startlist up and I wasn't off for another 40mins. Went and sat down for a bit, and then had to do another warm-up! Slightly narked, but not quite in boo status. Anyway, set off quite hard on the long leg to #1 but got a bit unsure in the cicle - lots of broken ground and no obvious dot knoll. So slightly unconfident going through the next 3 really short legs, and didn't get much to match up losing a total of 30-40secs on these, so almost a minute down at this stage. Then it got really fast and open for a couple of km and I dug in and got some decent splits. Coped ok with the next technical section, dug in on the next short fast section, smooth enough through the final technical section and finally hit the lead at #18 when Shep made a mistake. It only lasted to the penultimate control where I binned 20secs and let both Simon and Shep through - didn't have a clear attackpoint and hit the lake behind it.
Anyway, a good race - didn't lose much over 1min, but pretty gutted to throw it away at the death. It's all well and good winning easy splits by a couple of seconds in a race like this, but it all comes down to smoothness and consistency on the tricky legs. A great, fast middle race.