Orienteering race 3:56:00 [4] *** 17.0 km (13:53 / km)
NavStock Night Adventure Run with Hingo and Bent. Sure, it's tougher to navigate through the woods at night, but at least you know it will be nice and cool, right? WRONG. It was hot, humid and smoggy, and only two team members were carrying water. (Hingo's bladder exploded during the first climb.) (Which sounds like an even worse problem than it was, if you're not familiar with Camelbaks. ;-) )
We loved adventure running at night! I hope there are future night adventure runs - this was the first. We've done enough overnight adventure races that it felt perfectly natural to be running around in the dark. Our route choices were conservative, with more trail running than usual and very obvious attackpoints. The three of us split up for the Matrix (as usual, 2 CPs for Bent and 1 each for Hingo and me) and arrived at the next CP closer together than we ever have - all within a few minutes. Only one serious nav problem when we got onto the wrong ridge looking for CP6 and descended too far, but Hingo did an awesome job of relocating us when we hit a couple of unexpected trails.
Bent wasn't feeling his best in the heat, but valiantly towed me on the longer trail and road sections. That's riskier at night, since I often glance at the map when I'm on tow and usually have some peripheral vision to avoid ankle-turning rocks. Ouch! Oh well, if I keep my ankle injury-free, I'll never become a real orienteer like Hammer.
The race was lots of fun, a well-designed course by Griz, and a good result for the Tree Huggers: 2nd Coed by 8 minutes, and 5th overall. Also a new personal record of a different kind - driving to a campground shower building at 3:45 a.m.!
Wildlife report: We only saw the scary ones tonight. While I was on tow on a paved residential road, Bent suddenly yanked to the left to avoid a skunk standing 2 meters away with its tail up, facing away from us. Yikes! Then on the final run over the ski hill, Hingo gave me a full body tackle as he skilfully leapt out of the path of a porcupine.