A belated post to offer my excuses for appearing at the bottom of the results for the Brown course at this year’s November Classic. Having done our helping in advance of the day it meant we didn’t have quite the same rush on the day. I took the children round the string course which was conveniently located adjacent to the parking and assembly area. When the chill wind dropped and the sun came out it was actually quite pleasant. Christine then took over the child minding and I jogged off to the start.
I was pleased to find that my ankle, although still slightly swollen from the CompassSport Cup final, didn’t seem to be causing me any trouble and, not having done a huge amount of running, my legs actually felt reasonably fresh. My navigation wasn’t particularly clean though and I seemed to spend rather a lot of time about 50 metres adrift from the control site. It wasn’t a bad run though and would have put me in fourth place had it not been for the small fact that, on downloading, I appeared to be missing control number 4…
I try to use a backup card at larger events using Emit but there was apparently no mark in the appropriate place. Unfortunately, the use of a backup card was probably my downfall. Without one, I’m pretty good at checking the display on my card to ensure I have punched but I tend not to when I do have a backup card. As is often the case with Emit though, on this occasion there were several controls where I found it impossible to get my wrist oriented to get the card down flat. It would seem that control 4 was one of these and, although my GPS shows that I did at least visit the control (I found I couldn’t actually remember!), I stand disqualified.
Dave,
It is a shame they don’t accept GPS tracks as being valid. I have been doing some local orienteering here (the Auckland summer series) and they are sufficiently friendly that they let you enter your own time. I did the first few and wondered why I was doing so well and then realised that I had the auto pause function enabled on my gps watch. After that it went rapidly downhill.
Still it is not as bad as the marathon I did on Saturday- one 5km stretch took
me 50 minutes!
Cheers,
Neil
Tee hee! You could come up with lots of new results listings based on GPS tracks: remove time spent running away from the control, total distance covered, …
What happened in the marathon then?
Ouch – sounds like a fairly serious event. I’ll use that as my excuse for not running round the streets of Southampton this winter. Shame I’m not doing anything else instead!
The basic failing in the marathon was that a winter spent running on roads around Auckland harbour didn’t prepare me for an off road marathon with over 2100m of climbing. There was one stretch which was basically a scramble along a stream bed which took more time than it should have done.