Orienteering

Well orienteering was pretty cool! Weather was a bit fickle again but we were so busy running round trying to find the checkpoints that I didn't really notice the rain.

Friday I went off down to Mapworld and bought a compass which was a bit of a novel experience, I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at it and hoping like hell it would all make sense come Sunday! Nadia and I rocked up nice and early for the event, it starts at a reasonable hour like 10am! Thats a nice change to all those early morning event starts. We had to decide on which course to do and what time to start. We got talking to a very nice lady who had answered my email query earlier in the week so that was good as she explained what the different colour courses were like and how hard they all were. We decided to be brave and tackle the orange course which was a medium level course. Start times are 3min apart and you just write down what time you want to go so we decided to go earlyish in case we were out there for forever! We paid over our $$ and were given a map and a list of checkpoints that we had to go to in order. Us being very naive about orienteering sat there and looked at the map and wondered where on earth we went to for the first clue, the first clue was a building and let's just say there were a few of those on the map! Little did we know that when you start the first thing you do is copy the checkpoints of a master map! Aahh all of a sudden things started to make more sense! We actually managed to find the first one relatively easily! Then the next one was a little harder, on the way to checkpoint 3 we managed to find checkpoint 4..... Hmmm, well from there we managed to work backwards up a rather muddy hill till we found several other people looking for checkpoint 3 as well! Finally find that one. We had some challenges finding some of the clues but when we were lost it seemed like everyone else was lost as well so that certainly made us feel a little better about our abilities!

Seriously this is a fun way to spend a few hours, apparently our course was about 3km long, it took us nearly 2 hours!! Crazy eh! Heaps of running around over interesting terrain and cos you are so busy you don't really notice the time, we did start to fade a little as we weren't really prepared food and drink wise to be out there that long! We know better for next time now.

Yay for having an awesome coach who suggests random stuff like this to keep training interesting and different! Thanks Richard!

Woohooo, have just been watching the Indy 500 before going to work and Scott Dixon won!! First Kiwi ever to win this race so that is wicked!

Quote for the day:

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

- Booker T. Washington