Halfway through the carnival already – months and months of planning, and it goes by in a flash.  Something remarkable happened today.  We drove to the middle of Nowheresville, on increasingly smaller and more remote roads.  Eventually we wound up next to a bush conservation reserve on the side of a small, boulder-strewn hill.  Rocks and contours – what more could you want? 

My course was in that nice sort of rock where there is open space between the clusters, and you can navigate by the vegetation.  I set off up a gentle slope, straight to my first control.  Bang – nailed it.  I was much less sure on no 2, but it was a drinks control and the strewn cups gave it away.  If it hadn’t been for that, I might have ignored it, as it seemed lower down the hill than I was expecting.  A bit of luck there.  On to no 3 – follow bearing, look for massive slab of bare rock, duck into a gap in the green vegetation, looking for a “shallow gully”.  That’s a term used by course setters for a random piece of dirt with no real contour worth describing – competitors hate them because they can be very hard to locate.  But my control was sitting there just where it should be.

Turning right, I kept to the edge of more vegetation, following a line of small clearings.  I was slightly too high, but noticed a few people on my left, moving with that smug “I found it” stride rather than that “where the hell is it” shuffle.  Checking over my shoulder to see where they’d popped out from, I spotted my rock immediately.  So far, so good!

Pressing on, the next 3 controls were all exactly where I expected.  I could pick the rock features as I approached them, and know that I had the right ones; it was just that sort of day.  Before I knew it, I was leaving the forest and heading downhill to the giant corflute Easter Egg that marked the final control.  I was very pleased with my navigating, but having stuck with my steady plodding pace, I had no expectations results wise. Surely the runners would be way quicker than me?

To my amazement, when I looked at the results on my phone, I couldn’t see my name, until I ran my eye from the bottom of the list upwards – and there I was in second place!  A miracle had somehow occurred.  Looking at the splits later, I realised that everyone except the winner and me had made a large error at some stage, losing heaps of time.  It was a tortoise and hare situation, and today the tortoise came out (almost) on top.