No hiding place

31 Jan.and the racing begins in earnest. The cloud and rain has lifted and you can now see for miles. Temperature a little cool and a little windy but pretty ideal for running. A 30 minute drive to the event. Am feeling a little nervous as I know I am not fit and still not sure how the calf will hold up under competition conditions. Try and get a good warm up. Meet and have a good chat with Norman Jones, an old orienteering friend who now lives in Portugal. Will be running the same class. Non orienteers reading this might want to switch off for the next 10 minutes. Middle distance race of 3.7k winning time likely to be just under 30 minutes. Get called up and wait at the map box. 300m run to the control flag, try and not race off, concentrate, work out route to first control but not before realising I could have saved a few seconds by not going to the start kite. No problem with 1. 1 to 2 drifted a little right onto the rock but could see the bolder, passed Graham Urkhart and said hello, did this break my concentration? Messed up 3 by thinking the hill top was in a reentrant rather than on the spur. Lost at least 2 minutes and relocated at 14. Really annoyed with myself. Rest went ok, hesitated at 7 and stupidly dropped into the reentrant after 11 rather than going round the top of it. It was difficult to find a clean way out. In total at least 3 minutes lost. However my time of 31.21 puts me first apparently, although I haven't seen the official results yet. Must concentrate more tomorrow. Then back to Marvao for the sprint race. The village is embargoed from 14:00 which means two hours of sitting round in the car in the car outside the city walls. Valerie meanwhile is cosied up in the cafe in front of a log fire. They walk us up the steep rocky slope to the start just outside the castle walls, then off into the technical bits. Run goes well even though the calf is very sore. No results up yet, will report tomorrow, but for this race was competing against the 50 plus so stiff competition.