Owls Count

This week the event was close to home - about eight miles to travel. This meant that we were able to get up later than usual and did not have to rush. Rather pleasant, which is also a good description of the weather. The area was a forest with many minor roads cutting through, leading to the course being a case of picking a few controls before crossing from one section to the next.

I started fairly well and was particularly pleased with the way I pushed hard on the early long leg. The problems came in the second part of the course. I lost about five minutes on finding controls 14 and 16. The first of these I confused myself by not noticing a stream on the map and looking in the wrong chunk of forest and the second I misread the mapped vegetation and overshot the control by 100m.

Also, somewhere in the middle of the course I slipped on some brashings coming out of a section of forest. While I do not seem to have done any damage I lost confidence to push my pace. In all I should have been about 10 minutes faster.