David Currie

It’s been an active week so far. Tuesday night was an Oslo City Cup race at Godliaparken on the west side of Oslo. A 1:5000 sprint race map again with a mix of fast woodland and open areas around the school and flats. My biggest mistake of the night was at the third control where I was a bit to the right. This cost me a whole 23 seconds but was enough for the guy who started 15 seconds behind me to catch up. I then spent the rest of the race desperately clinging on – my legs tired from two hilly runs at the weekend – only staying in touch by avoiding his small mistakes. Although only less than three minutes down on the winner, I’m still in the middle of the results. I think I’d be pushing it to run 3km in 13 minutes in terrain even if I didn’t have to find 19 controls!

Wednesday night I was back at Sognsvann. Fortunately they have retrieved the results from the last time I ran as this week’s effort wasn’t anything to write home about. Oddly enough my legs weren’t any less tired than the previous evening and there was just no speed left in them. I’ve even slipped out of the top ten.

The Norwegians, unlike the British, have the decency to fix a public holiday to my birthday so I was guaranteed to have Thursday off work. As Christine has already reported, we headed down to Bygdøy for Gromløpet – a middle distance orienteering race. I think it’s fairly safe to say that I did not have a good run and this time it didn’t have much to do with speed. I never thought I’d find myself in Norway on a map with too many paths on it! You couldn’t even just ignore them as the running wasn’t great off them and there wasn’t a great deal else to use to navigate. My eventual technique was just to run along with the map held about 10cm from my face being very precise about using the point of the compass to identify my exact location.

My worst leg was to control nine where I found myself needing to relocate. This lost me four minutes and the worst part of it was that I was actually stood next to a control later on in the course at one point and didn’t realise it! Anyway, I’d like to thank Trond Simensen who saved me from appearing last in the results on my birthday.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Orienteering, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.