Short blue, nominal 4.8km/110m
Apocalyptic rain on the A34 but it was merely drizzly in Hampshire, thankfully. Planning a steady run today as I was on a brown course tomorrow and slightly doubtful of my fitness for a course of that length + wanting to protect my ankle.
A tentative start - no blank maps and this was an area I'd not seen a routegadget for, so my first view of the map was when I picked it up out of the box. Slightly overran the faint stream off the path for #4, but doubled back to find the ctrl OK in dk green forest. Stuck to the big paths for longer run to #7 which was probably a suboptimal route, and found a bit more green there than was mapped, so a bit of a trudge in the circle (and the same for #8). A couple of black dotted lines in the open forest approaching these two, but I couldn't see a vegetation boundary they'd be mapped to - I wonder if they should've been brown dots (there were plenty of small ditches).
Left #11 slightly too far R but corrected OK (knew I was on course as I ran back past #9). Very slow in the avenues in the cultivated forest to #13 – should’ve run off to one side.
Then couldn’t find #14, looped around on the stream valley side until I realised that the control I’d previously punched as #6 was in fact #14, and #6 was further E! (At the time I got to #6 I thought “funny looking platform” but didn’t check the ctrl no. as it was facing away from me: no separate descriptions – this was all done using the map, so a lot of the time I was only glancing at the descriptions and not really paying attention. It was all pretty soggy so turning the map around to read them was a faff.) Oh well!
Trundled back to the finish, overran #15 and a slight miss E and then W for #16 and #17, not really switched on any more. Ankle seemed pretty good in the forest. Will tape it up tomorrow and see how it goes.
http://www.sn.routegadget.co.uk/rg2/#86&course...