WCOC local meet at Five Ponds, courtesy of Charlie DeWeese.
Nice day, nice course, but I have a hard time remembering when I've had a worse outing. The note on my
map says it all -- "No brain, no energy." But other than that I guess it was OK. :-)
A little shaky to the first one, then misread where I was nearing 2 and thought I was farther east, turned west and before long there was a house in front of me. Spent quite a long time in the area just standing still, not figuring out where I was. The next few were OK. But then came 7....
Cut west to the trail. Turned right, it looked a little funny, and shortly I remembered that I was heading to 7 and not 8. Thought I might as well head straight to the next junction, but seem to have crossed a good-sized trail without seeing it. And wandered a while through various forms of crap.
And wandered some more.
And got quite discouraged.
And thought about the various things I could do, like quit, or at least not turn in a time, or whatever.
And at some point I thought maybe I'd somehow gotten to the right place, so I checked out a couple of knolls, but no such luck.
And went a while longer.
And then the nice big trail and corner of the pond made it pretty easy to figure out where I was. Spiked 7 from there, at a very low rate of speed.
Missed 8 too, lots of logged stuff and I most certainly had neither strength nor energy nor fighting spirit.
And at some point in here the internal conversation shifted to the question -- If you are feeling like this, why in the world are you thinking about getting on a plane to go orienteering someplace this spring/summer?
And my heels were not doing good either.
But usually quitting is not in my vocabulary, so I kept going, finished, though totally without distinction.
The only positive thing I'll take from it is that the route I drew on the map afterwards and the FR route are not that different, even when I had no idea where I was.... :-)