orienteering (Wattle Ridge State League) 1:39:19 [3] 6.0 km (16:33 / km)
shoes: Inov8 ORoc 280
I definitely owe G a favour for being willing to drive out to Wattle Ridge today and then stay in the car reading a book for a couple of hours while I went orienteering, which took me even longer than I had thought it would because the ground was so soft underfoot, both from last summer's bushfires and from 3 days of heavy rain. I started off ok,being fairly conservative navigationally and taking wide route choices around the sandstone valleys - sometimes unnecessarily wide but anywhere that a gully crossed a rockface it was now a creek with a waterfall, and I'm really glad that I didn't do the W21 course because the wide-around choices weren't really an option at all for them.
After crossing the road I had thought I was heading south across a valley and up a line of bare rock but somehow I made a 90-degree error and ended up at a track junction about 500m east of where I'd intended to be (which would have been ok if I'd decided to take the road around in the first place...). Started to realise that I was really hungry and still had half the course to go. Got a bit distracted by people headless chickening around me at the end of that leg and also partway along another leg (I knew I hadn't gone far enough and needed to be beyond the next knoll, but got suckered in to doing laps of some unmapped cliffs, AKA mapped rocky ground, with other people anyway.
Was running out of my own legs by now too so it was fairly slow going and I did come out to the road on a couple of legs, but possibly not on the ones where I should have done so, so frittered away a bit of time towards the end of the course also but was still horrified to be as much as 18 min behind Tracy - clearly I should have eaten twice as much for breakfast so that I could focus better. And maybe being here for the recent women's coaching weekend could have been somewhat beneficial too?
Back at the hotel, it took me even more rinses (6) to wash the mud out of my O socks than it had done in Scotland...anyway, on the bright side, for once we are not staying at the riverfront caravan park In Penrith. If we were, we would have been evacuated by now!