Czech orienteering failure

Yesterday we went to the middle distance orienteering event that Petr was controlling for his club OK Jilemnice. It was a national competition for elite competitors and a regional competition for others. We had both entered elite. The area (called Omega after the building on the map) was steep and littered with rock features. This didn’t bode well for me as I’m not the most aggressive of runners at the best of times. With 23 controls any navigational errors soon added up. Suffice is to say that I ended up ten minutes down on the rest of the elite field and even Christine was two minutes behind the penultimate runner on her course.

Today it was a classic race on a less steep area – CísaÅ™ský Kámen. The rocks also tended to be huge boulders so, in general, the area was much more runnable. However, even though I was only running H21A today, the course was still over 13km which, combined with the day’s heat, was always going to be tough work. Unfortunately I went over on my ankle early on in the course and again a few controls later. At about the furthest point on the course (but with about two-thirds of the course still to go) I finally decided to jack it in and jogged back to the assembly area. Christine wasn’t far behind me as the blister she had picked up yesterday was giving her grief.

Sadly, having both retired, neither of us was eligble to win the lottery! This was based on guessing the sum of the winner’s time and your own. However, you also weren’t allowed to take more than three times the winner on any one leg so that would have probably ruled me out anyway!

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