Sometimes I can be so stupid! Yesterday afternoon I went to the Military League event that the Sarum juniors were organising at Turf Hill and Millersford. Things started well enough with the best split to the first control and, although my legs were sluggish in the heather and marsh, I didn’t feel too bad.
There were no loose control descriptions so I was trying to remember a couple of control codes at a time to save unfolding the map on every leg. Unfortunately when I got to control seven, I couldn’t remember having used up the preceding code that I had in my head. This was plausible as it would have been a small deviation coming across the open, I knew I was trying to avoid going to 16 rather than 6, and I could easily have lost my place whilst refolding the map. Consequently, I went back for 6 before returning to 7 again.
The remainder of my run was fairly clean with only a brief wobble at 14 where there was a lot more vegetation on the ground than the map. I finished the 9km course in 53:11. Only later as I was examining my splits printout did I realise my stupidity. It turned out that I had, in fact, already been to 6 and somehow I had ‘forgotten’. Don’t ask me what I was thinking about at the time but it obviously wasn’t orienteering!
The really frustrating thing (and this doesn’t show up in the online splits which just have a long time for number eight) is that I wasted 3 minutes and 20 seconds going back to 6 and, as you can see in the results, I was just 3 minutes behind the winner. Maybe next time…