Wednesday afternoon in summer for me means the Orienteering Summer Series. This is a 23 race series at different venues around Sydney so you get to see a lot of place you would not normally see. Today we raced at Abbotsford, just towards the end of the Great North Road.
For the uninitiated these races are great, you have a flexible start time, anywhere from 4pm onwards and with daylight saving this means you can start up to around 6:30pm and still have daylight. You get given a detailed map with 30 control points placed at various objects, each control point has a point value (1-10 = 10 points, 11-20 = 20 points and 21-30 = 30 points). The goal is to accumulate as many points within the 45 minutes allotted time from when you start. The big trap though, is for every minute or part thereof you are late you have 10 points deducted from your score. More info here http://www.sydneysummerseries.com.au/ (not a bad website even if I say so myself). For those familiar with Rogaining, this is like a sprint Rogaine.
Anyway enough of the plugs I hear you say what about the run?
Quite a warm and windy afternoon and I get the map and do a quick planning session as to my proposed optimum route to get the most points in the least time. Quite a few hills/steps and I identify a couple of cut back points if time starts running out. I run these now with the bodylink on to try and get a feel for my pace and also distance run. Head off and try and maintain 5min/k pace which will be tight given some of the terrain and also because you have to slow down/stop to find the control which is usually an inverted painted pot plant bowl.
Midway through the course I'm a little behind the schedule but have done the worst of the cutting back portions and also the hills so some faster flat running. Opt to leave out 2 x 20 pointers that would require quite a deal of climbing and cutting back and in the end have to sprint to the finish, already running late with about 2 seconds to spare to avoid losing 20 points.
End up with 550 out of a maximum of 600 points which is above my par from last year. A couple of guys picked up the 600 in the required time and I probably would have been a little closer with slightly better route choice.
Run stats were
8.6km in 45:58 which gives an average pace 5:21, not too bad for what was a challenging hilly course. Average HR was 179, probably a bit too low....
Managed to pick up a blister again on my left heel, bugger.
1 comment:
wow, those races sound like a blast! we had to do something similar to that in the military, but there was more emphasis placed on the navigation aspect of it, since most of the checkpoints were in the middle of thick bush.
i'll have to look around locally to see if they offer something like that here in the states this coming summer. keep us posted on your progress!
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