Got up soon after 4:00, as dawn had broken and I thought that someone had better fix it. Exciting visions of head torches emerging from the wood - obviously it was still dark within. Rosco handed over to me soon after 6:00, with us in 4th place after sterling runs by all our team thus far. Stirling runs from the Forth Valley Orienteers, I mean.

Unfortunately I seemed to have used up my good runs the day before, and this one was not one of the best - finding the controls seemed to be much harder work than usual, due perhaps to having left brain soundly asleep in the tent, but more obviously to the difficulty of working out which paths were paths, which patches of leaf debris were paths, and which paths were just bits of leaf debris in path-like patterns. This led to crucial error on my 6th control, which could have been even worse if I hadn't checked the code on the wrong control as an afterthought, and discovered that it was my number 7. I therefore knew (temporarily) where I was, and took a bearing towards number 6. Sadly it wasn't that simple, and I first found another control lying on the ground, with no associated feature in sight (I discovered later that it was supposed to have been a vegetation boundary). And even when I did find my number 6 (it looks from the splits like a 5-minute error), it didn't prove as easy as it should have been to find number 7 again...

That was just the biggest of many wobbles and hesitations, and I completed the course feeling I must have lost us thousands of places, although at least I had punched the right controls, always the worst fear in a relay... It turned out it wasn't as bad as all that - the final results put me in 7th place for that leg, and only one team (BAOC) had overtaken during that leg, while I had even made up time on the Bristol team one place in front of us. Crucially, though, ShUOC had made up almost five minutes (exactly the length of my blunder on control 6), which turned out to be a turning point in the battle for 4th/5th/6th...

Most exciting moment of the day was the final battle on the last leg for 4th, 5th and 6th place, which saw the positions change hands between the spectator control, map exchange and run-in. Shouting Roger on in his amazing sprint to attempt to recover 5th place must have burned off a lot of extra calories amongst his team-mates too - and he would have managed it if not for wily use of the inside line by the Bristol runner...

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