Competing over the weekend

Douglas and I were both competing this weekend. Douglas was actually asked to compete in both an inter-club rifle competition and the Southland Cross Country champs. He'd already accepted the rifle competition before invited to run, so on Saturday, he headed off to Tuatapere with Shane to shoot down there. He had a good day. He shot a single card, and a double, which he hasn't shot before. His single was the best card he's ever shot. This is the card: smallbore_card.pdf . His double card shoot was pretty good too ave 94 between them. I decided to go down to Invercargill today for the club orienteering. My main motivation to go was to test out my new fancy specs - see the main image. They are pretty much plain, but with a small bifocal bit at the bottom to enable me to read the map when running. Joe Sherriff had planned and MTBO course (mountain bike orienteering). There was a long, medium and short course and he'd made the short and medium suitable for foot orienteering too. I entered the medium course. Joe warned me that the navigation was relatively easy and that the area didn't really lend itself to running off the tracks. The MTBO maps ( MTBOMap201507.pdf) are a little different to foot orienteering too, so what looks runnable isn't necessarily, but Joe also warned me of this too. As it turned out there was very little that was accessible off the tracks it was mostly run as fast as you could round the tracks. One or two little bits I was able to run through forest, mostly to add a little bit of interest. I felt that I had been a bit slow when I got to the end. Looking at the results though, it turns out I won the runner's event, and apart from between 6 & 7 (where I made a mistake) I was pretty much the fastest. Not what I expected. I also was only beaten by 1 in the mountain bike category (results). I was definitely surprised by this! The best thing was that my new glasses worked great, and for the first time since starting orienteering (short course stuff like this, rather than the stuff like the KIMM I used to do in UK) I was able to read the map whilst on the move. Just a little problem with them fogging up when I was running v hard and sweating lots (it was a v cold day which probably didn't help that issue) So overall a good weekend