Run race ((orienteering)) 2:04:00 [4] *** 18.3 km (6:47 / km) +450m 6:02 / km
spiked:27/30c
NOL ultra-long. I've been setting myself for this for a while - I really want to finish one of these before I retire from elite long-distances properly. It will have to wait for another year; carrying an injury into a race like this was always taking a bit of a risk, and in the end it got the better of me. The hamstring was becoming increasingly sore through the second loop, but as long as it was only soreness that was something I could live with. A few hundred metres from the end of that loop it took a significant turn for the worse and I felt significantly weakened pushing off on that side; had it been 3 or 4k to go I might have tried to push on through it (and probably lived to regret it), but 10k on one-and-a-half legs (at best) was too much to contemplate.
The pity of it was that this was the day; from the endurance point of view I was feeling fine, and I'm as confident as one could be that without injury I would have been able to make a decent fist of the final loop. (At that stage I wasn't too far behind tRicky, who ended up sixth). One error of consequence, a minute or so on #9 on the first loop where I couldn't quite make sense of the yellow and the knolls (I couldn't quite make sense of it the second time round either - it was a common control on the splits - but didn't lose much time at that attempt). In a few decent head-to-heads at times with the likes of tRicky, Simon Rouse (who made it all the way round only to be outed for going round the final butterfly the wrong way), and Jim before he dropped away.