Note
I am very tired and sleep-deprived. At 2 AM today morning I did indeed walk backwards for a whole hour around Fellows Quad drinking port and wearing my black and white sub fusc. And not only did I walk backwards, I walked backwards linking arms with other people (so we formed a chain of anywhere from 3 to 7 people) and at each corner of Fellows quad (since we were basically walking around a square of grass) we would do an elegant turn of sorts. (Well, at least it looks elegant when two people do it. Our chain of 6 people wasn't so elegant when we tried to do a 360 at the corner.) By the end of the Ceremony, we were doing many many turns all over the place, for no apparent reason. I was surprised I still knew which way was up and which way was right after that. Also, I was surprised that I only had a bit of port on my scarf and hands, but not on my white shirt. Most people, I think, ended up with at least some amount of port on their clothes because walking backwards while holding cups of port is definitely not good for coordination. It didn't help that we occasionally had traffic jams, caused by some people walking slower than others. And there were times I felt like I would fall backward if not for the people holding my arms on both sides...
So basically, I had about 2.5 hours sleep last night. And now I am going to go orienteering. We will see how the walking backwards has affected my orientation skills. (Or more likely, how port and lack of sleep has affected them.)
Orienteering 1:17:39 [2] 6.52 km (11:55 / km) +180m 10:28 / km
shoes: VJ Twisters!
A blue course at Longleat Cannimore Woods. I decided to take it easy today, for various reasons. First, I'm sore, second I'm sick, third, I have blisters and my right ankle still hurts, and fourth, Boris wants me to rest. So I decided to not do the brown course (which was 8 km) and settled for this 6.5 km blue course.
It was raining quite hard before we even started orienteering, so there was mud and puddles everywhere. It was the type of day where people didn't even bother trying to run alongside the paths and avoid the mud - they just splashed right through it.
This course involved quite a lot of thinking and picking route choices. Just like the course at Leith Hill last week, this one had us going uphill, downhill, through the woods, through thorns, over logged trees, and so on. (Basically, this qualified as orienteering.)
There were 16 controls on my course total, not including the finish, and I only really messed up 5 of them. This is progress for me. The first problem control was #5. The leg from 4 to 5 went straight across the map and was quite long. I aimed to follow a small trail, cut through the woods to another trail, run to an intersection with a big trail, and then continuing on that till I got to my attackpoint (the place where the big trail split off in two directions). I got on the big trail with no problem (although perhaps half a minute of hesitation in total) and now it was just a matter of running up the hilly trail and keeping a look-out for my attackpoint. But, of course, after running on this for about a minute or two, I saw a guy in the woods and I thought I might have run far enough, so instead of going up and double-checking to see if the trail junction was actually there, I ran into the woods and found a control...which wasn't mine. So then I went back onto the road and continued till I did actually reach my attackpoint. From there, I found the control with no problems. So basically, this was a nice reminder to myself to ignore the other people in the woods and carry out my own plans. I think I lost at least 3 minutes on this little sidetrip.
The next control I didn't do so well on was number 9. In this case, however, it was just a matter of me not quite knowing which approach was best. This was another control which had several possible route choices. I decided to take some combination of trails to the right of the control and then head alongside the vegetation boundary till I hit the control. Of course, in reality, when I tried to get off the trail into the woods, I was stopped by nettles taller than I was. So I thought for a moment, decided not to be stupid, and turned back onto the trail. I ran along it a bit more and this time saw that the woods were more runnable now. (This was perhaps the most clear-cut vegetation boundary I have ever seen. While running through the woods, the pines were so dense that I continuously had to keep ducking underneath and it was really dark too!) After crossing several streams, I headed right towards the edge of these pines and then followed the thorns north till I found the control. I didn't get lost on this control or do anything too stupid, but there was a lot of hesitation and uncertainty, which I probably lost about 2 minutes on (at least).
Ahh. Number 11. By this point I suppose I was getting rather tired and the concentration was waning. There were two trails on the map right above number 10, sort of parallel. So I thought I was running on the top trail and headed east on it, then went south, then went into the woods, and then stood there confused. Finally, I figured out that I had been on the lower of the two trails and I had just gone downhill for no good reason!! So now I had to climb back uphill and keep running east towards the control. I definitely lost 5-6 minutes on this one. At least once I figured out my mistake, I knew how to correct it immediately.
Number 13 was an easy control that should not have taken me 4 minutes to find. It was quite close to 13, same elevation, and technically simple. But I came out of the woods thinking I was more south than I actually was. So I wound up hopping over dead branches for a minute or so instead of jogging easily down a parallel trail. I realized my mistake soon enough, found the silly control, and moved on.
The last bad control was #14. I came to the right place and was within 10 feet of the blasted thing. And it wasn't even hidden!!! It was simply to the north of some green and I had come around the green and therefore didn't see it (since I was looking forward). If only I had turned around! Instead, I wound up walking around there for a while trying to sort out which clumps of green were what on the map. Finally, I figured it must have been there behind me somewhere and sure enough I found it. I think I lost about 5 minutes on that one.
So in total, I had about 16 minutes of big mistakes on those five bad controls. Besides these five controls, I actually did the others quite nicely. And I really did take it easy today. I didn't sprint on the trails, but took the time to fold my map and even look ahead a bit. And when approaching controls, if I saw other orienteers (which happened a few times) I looked at my map to try to figure out exactly where the control was. It felt sweet to find the control first and definitely gave me some much-needed confidence about my navigation. =)