Orienteering race 1:38:33 [3] ** 10.42 km (9:27 / km) +280m 8:20 / km
spiked:15/28c shoes: New Balance RX Terrain
angryhaggis did say that he didn't really fancy this area, and I can kind-of see why. At 10.4km, this courses is about 2km shorter than other M21L courses I've done this term, and you could deduce something about the area from that fact. There's quite a lot of green on the map and there was quite a lot of grot on the forest floor. There were also numerous occasions I was having to push branches and stuff out of the way of my face, not pleasant.
I hadn't done much (enough?) training during the week and so didn't feel in entirely good shape. It's perhaps unsurprising that I didn't have a particularly fast time. The swelling wasn't too much of a problem once I'd loosened my right shoelaces, and I also got a bit of a blister on the back of my left heel. However, blisters aren't a problem - a Compeed will sort them out.
The sheer amount of green meant that I used paths quite a lot. In some places this was the only way to go, and in fact the leg bnetween controls 20 & 21 was pretty much a path run through some houses.
The biggest mistakes I made were at numbers 4 and 19. When I got to the area around number 4, I knew I was in the right sort of area, but seemed unable to actually find the control. In the end, the way I actually found it was to use a nearby short section of path.
To get to number 19, I took a path route most of the way. I then paced from a path junction to what seemed to be a clearing in the forest, and from there to a thicket. But despite being quite careful with the pacing, I found myself at a different thicket to the control. I ran round a few other thickets but wasn't sure exactly how to find the control since my compass-and-pacing had failed to find the control. In the end I spotted the control from a distance.