Orienteering tonight. Running the best I’ve been in months – helped by a good dose of mental attitude to push myself as hard as possible, given it’s the penultimate event in a series I still have a chance of winning. For the first time since longer than I can remember I feel like I’m actually going well enough to do really well. Why do I have to make a huge very basic mistake of the sort I never normally make when otherwise I’d have been cruising to the win?

So frustrating – mentally I could really do with a win of some sort right now. Don’t think I’ve managed to win anything at all in over a year, not even a minor event like this which I used to not count as a proper win when I used to swim in a bigger pond.

Not expecting any sympathy, just needing to vent a bit of the frustration eating me up.

you take all that competing far too seriously Chris! 🙂

Wrong turn was it?

You started thinking about the end when you weren’t there.

Never mention our 5hr circle , day 5 of an AR race, sugar cane fields. Un-be-li-ev-ab-le. I cried later on my bike out of sheer frustration, we were maybe 7 hours from a top 3 finish. Came 5th. Hadn’t slept in 36hrs and nothing on the map bore any relation to what we were in. Ignored the basics.

Stay in the moment. But annoying i sympathise.

you used your left brain

Ta for the reminder. Once upon a time (15+ years ago) I was a BOF instructor, but since then I’d let myself go a little. Just found a local event in a couple of weeks time and fancy having a go at the POW couse in a couple of weeks now that I can actually run more than 1K with out dying.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/swnygwy/pow/

You started thinking about the end when you weren’t there.

Not quite. I was busy planning ahead the next few legs though. Fatal. Went searching for the control one block of forest too soon, having not noticed I was supposed to cross another track on the way there.

Best one i ever saw was a very close 24hr adv race where we started at 1am, nice run/trek then a long hard MT then a foot ori race then a jog down to get in the kayaks for a 4hr ish paddle. First two controls were 3 numbers, put them together and you got a grid ref for the TA. Somehow, and I have no fckn idea how they did this, our main competitors who were both in front of us managed to concoct a GR that was utterly wrong and at the dead end of a passage of water. We saw them sort of heading that way and basically hid in amongst the big seas until we could safely paddle off in the right direction. Coming into the TA we could see no other boats ! Got in 1st and encountered the wayward 2 teams completing a 5k unexpected portage as we finished the next orienteering leg. Very funny. We came 2nd after a bit of argy bargy on the final ride !! Good racing though – 21 hours and separated by less than 30 seconds.