8.2km M21L course at Glen Affric South. Very possibly the most unpleasant terrain I have ever ventured into - using the internationally recognised unit for rough and inhospitable terrain, the Voose, I would go so far as to say this was two vooses - certainly far less enjoyable than Voose was and definitely knocked Ringwood Forest off the top spot of places never to re-visit.
Knew it was going to be rough, but in the first three controls there was very little that I could actually run, and I orienteer for running in terrain rather than for battling through rough stuff. Got reasonably close to 3 then stuck behind thick and inpenetrable windblow. After quite a while of deciding, I did decide to go in and punch the control, and did 4 as well as on the way to a nice path for a training run.
Gave up on course from here and started training run to get in some distance and climb, and reasonable pace - went up hill along stream then down a vehicle track into the open, which was dreadful - had to be run to be believed - Clive came along and agreed, 12 mins to do 600m so clouded my training run a bit.
Came back via the Plodda falls, stopping to look at them from the platform, and got some good views of snowy mountains and wooded glens - things that couldn't be done in a race.
Looking at various courses after, seems that we drew the short straw as most others had a long route choice leg allowing for path running, whereas ours was all shortish legs with no route choice, designed to keep us off the paths and in the worst of the terrain. Needed close attention to execute correctly but reasonably straight forward - I wasn't losing anywhere near as much time in mistakes as I was due to the very variable runnability "terrain and can't really muster up any enthusiasm - just not my thing.
Needless to say, won't be coming back tomorrow as although it should be better terrain, it surely isn't one million times better, and faffing with parking single occupancy cars 3km from assembly, 2.6k from assembly to start (5.6k car to start?) and it being 60 mins drive the other side of Inverness to home just makes it not worth it if I'm going to struggle to run and enjoy it.
Plan will be for parkrun in the morning, followed by a very relaxed drive down to England, probably stopping off for a terrain run somewhere before Perth.
https://www.strava.com/activities/363591983/overvi...