Orienteering 34:20 [4] 4.3 km (7:59 / km) +35m 7:40 / km
shoes: Asics DS Trainer 13
First orienteering in Brissy - a little park/street event after dark in Coopers Plains. Felt decent and went round at a decent trot without mishap except for 3 unusual events ...
First, I had no idea what the thick stuff in the park would be like, so come to leg 4, I decide to follow a little corridor of open and then through about 50m of light green ... oops. The clearing ran out early and the green turned out to be head-high grass with a smattering of blackberry and god-knows what else. Stomped through it complaining for a couple of minutes and then followed my tracks back out, to take one of the wide track options. Coincidentally, this is vary similar to my first run in Calgary, where I wore 3/4 tights into Bowmont Park and got my legs shredded.
Second, incident occurred about 3/4 of the way round. I zipped out of path onto a road and past a woman walking a little yippy dog ... which of course was unleashed. The dog takes off and doesn't look like it's coming back, so the woman grumbles and asks me to stop while she catches it. Well I did but the dog kept going and after 20-30s of dithering not wanting to irritate the woman more, I found a detour and took it.
The third incident was the finish - I ran into it ... literally. Oddly, the organisers had put a control stand up for the finish with no flag but under a lamp so it could be seen if you looked really carefully. So I came running in hard, didn't see it, and clocked the damn thing with upper outer edge of my left knee. The subsequent swearing wasn't a good first impression with the Brisbane orienteering crowd, I'm sure. It bled a bit and swelled up into a good egg by the time I got home.