Our route to the car park and assembly for day 3 of the OO Cup took us up and over a winding pass with amazing, steep, forested vistas down the big valleys towards the capital, Ljubljana, in the distance, with endless mountains visible beyond.
Leaving Holly in ‘Kindergarden’, Cath and I started the epic walk to the start – 2.5km with 250m climb. Waiting for our start time we were treated to lots of jangly bells before a whole heard of friendly cows ambled into pre-start and started munching. They seemed completely non-plussed by lots of orienteers running up and down warming up.
Everybody from the blue start was thrown straight into a low-visibility, rocky, steep, complex hillside. There were people everywhere, all struggling straight away (Ray was asked within 75 metres of the start if he knew where he was!). I forged uphill for a fence, my catching feature and attack point for number 1, but really got confused after it as to what was up and down
. Eventually I re-located on a col before taking a safe route in but I must have lost a couple of minutes. I ran clean for the rest of the course except for one bad mistake where I left a track at the wrong junction, but relocated quite quickly. The course was full-on, massive complexity, low visibility and really uneven and rough under foot, with rocks, fallen trees, steep crags, in fact just about every natural impediment imaginable except water. I fell back on super-accurate compass bearings, picking off features as I went, but it worked. We had a long leg right across the map just before the end. Although there was an obvious long route round on the roads and tracks I decided I hadn’t come al the way to Slovenia to do that, so took the straight route over the saddle and down into the control.
We had a long walk back from the finish with over 200m of descent. As Holly was still in kindergarden and still needed to be shadowed round her course I ran all the way back to assembly. I more or less scooped her up and went straight to her start, shattered but made it just as they were packing up. Bumbling round behind her on her W10, I could barely keep up.
When eventually we returned I ventured to the results – I was 4th!It seems that careful control picking paid off. Before today I was lying 8th overall, so hopefully I will pull up a few places with today’s result.
Used headcam today – first look there is some good footage, just need to edit 90 mins down to 7 now !