Orienteering race 1:06:30 [4] ***
'Bent and I were both pretty tired from yesterday, but we knew that Nick and the Stars would put on a great event, so we wanted to go anyway. Glad we did! It was a perfect sunny, cool day, and the course was lots of fun.
We started out with a scramble to find 3 controls in the park in any order. Then one or both team members could do a 12-control sprint. I convinced 'Bent to do it alone, to a chorus of groans. Meanwhile, I had an opportunity to study some maps that were posted for a later stage of the race. As I had known he would, 'Bent had a great sprint and moved us up to 2nd behind Mick.
We ran to the University of Waterloo campus next, where we had another scramble to pick up 5 controls, using a cool map that was a patchwork quilt of aerial photo and O map. One of the controls was the boar statue in front of the Modern Languages building, which I remembered from going to school there N years ago. We also went right past the window of my old residence room at St. Paul's College. Wish I'd had more time to reminisce and get all sentimental, but that's hard to do when I'm being hauled along by a tow rope attached to my pack hip belt!
We crossed to Columbia Field, where we ran to the central point of the Star. There were 4 small maps waiting for us, each one showing a small piece of terrain with the start point and a single control. The team could split up, and 'Bent and I each ran out and back to two different controls, finishing at almost the same time - yay. From there, we ran back to the traffic lights and across the university campus. Back at the park, we had a short section of a strip map, where we had to find two controls before the finish. Fun!
For the 2nd half of the race, we played cat and mouse with a young all-male team. They were faster, but several times, we arrived at subtle controls or traffic lights first, making life a little easier for anyone who happened to be just behind us. We reached the finish line about a minute after them, then discovered to our surprise that the overall winners were actually a couple of kids (both teenaged boys - at least I HOPE they were that old). We'd seen them out there in a few places, but didn't really think they could be doing the whole course. We'd never seen them at other orienteering events - where did they come from?? Anyway, that was very cool to see. So we settled happily for 3rd overall and 1st Coed. I turned down the fancy, high-tech hats intended to be our prize (which we already own) to get a box of chocolates filled with cherries and brandy. Yahoo, instant gratification!!!
This was the first race where I tried the trick I'd read about on AP of carrying my Forerunner in my Camelbak aimed upwards, rather than wearing it on my wrist where it could provide minor navigation assistance. How does it work? Well, I'm sure it works a heck of a lot better if you remember to turn it on! Too bad, we would have loved to know how far we went today.