Orienteering race (Swinley West brown) 1:21:22 [4] *** 9.45 km (8:37 / km) +50m 8:23 / km
spiked:19/25c
I was looking forward to this, but a number of factors conspired to spoil it a bit. First there were no control descriptions left, not a bad thing when the map is the quality of the SN one yesterday, but. The maps had run out as well so I had to wait at the start for a recycled one and. The one I picked up had been folded and creased so much the detail was flaking off and. It was on ordinary thin paper and the printing was pretty low-res so I couldn't have said what the line features were anyway, and. The overprint was extremely faint. Finally, the planner had tried to encourage straight line running, but the route through the bracken was always the worst and I never realised this till the very end.
I lost a bit of time at 4 because I found an unmapped ditch (or was it a veg bounday, or just a crease?), but my biggest mistake was at 6. After my first foray into the bracken had reduced me to a stumbling walk I lost focus a bit, overshot and ended up on a parallel ditch. No flag so I cut in eastwards and found another ditch without a flag either. I could see people running along something 30 metres away so found the mapped ditch but turned left along it instead of right. Four minutes lost.
I made silly tiny errors between 8 and 10, then foolishly braved the bracken again to 12 and pretty soon felt like giving up. I couldn't calculate a route for the long leg to 14 because of the state of the map, and the bracken did for me again between 17 and 18; the circuitous track route round being actually much quicker. Two weeks from now these courses might have been great; today they were purgatory. Another thing, the blue course was basically a segment of the brown one, which just seem sloppy.