Orienteering race 23:10 [4] 2.35 km (9:51 / km) +105m 8:03 / km
shoes: asics GT-2160 #2
Sprint the Bay event 1 at Woodford on the edge of Havelock North (whatever happend to Havelock South?). I was running in the M50 class so had some new faces to compete against: StK66, Jemery from Tas, Henrik from Denmark, Geoff from Hawkes Bay, plus some old faces: Ted van G and David P in particular.
The Woodford map was described as "it consists of very technical building detail, school grounds and farm type terrain. Parts of the map are very steep making it very physically demanding and also allowing for difficult route choice legs". So not the usual sprint area, but that was the nature of the entire STB competition and what a blast it all was :)
Started steady and passed StK66 on the way to 3 - only found out later that he hadn't been to 2 but got confused and ran with me to 3 and wasn't until after 4 that he realised and had to go back, but got lost finding 2 :( I was in first place by control 3 and stayed in the lead until control 14. Then came the bloody tennis courts. Like many I didn't see the tiny sliver of crossable fence at the control, and there wasn't anyone scaling it when I got there, so I ran around. Then made two poor route choices on the next two legs going left each time instead of right. On those three controls I lost nearly 2 minutes and the race. Didn't finish as well as I would have liked so need to keep focus right to the end. Finished in 6th place 1:24 down on Jemery.
Most notable effort of the day was Andrew Lumsden who went past the spectator control without punching. He was nearly finished when he realised he had missed it so he went and punched it and then completed the rest of the course a second time but this time through missed out control 16 which he had been to the first time so was DNF. At least he could laugh about it and had a great story to tell.
We had one of the few showers of rain in our 3 week trip while watching the elites but it didn't last long.