Lately I’ve been watching the British TV quiz show “Pointless”. I enjoy the mental challenge of thinking about the answers differently.  This afternoon’s race featured some pointlessness, but it wasn’t a challenge I could say I relished.

As we approached the afternoon’s venue, we could see that it was on a steeper slope, with a patch of bushland immediately behind the highest buildings.  “Do you think there will be controls in there?” Ian asked me.  “Nah” I replied.  “They didn’t tell us to bring shoes with grip, or wear protective clothing”.

Famous last words.

The first half of the course was perfectly fine – similar to this morning, with a lot of narrow corridors, stairs, ramps and canopies, with plenty of route choice and complexity.  The map was not as legible though, and we spent more time standing still and peering at it.  Still, I felt like I was doing well – and my splits show that I was 4^th after 4 controls. 

Then came the map flip. I had already seen people heading up the steep hill into the bush, but I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t send “the oldies” up there.  How wrong I was.  The first three controls after the flip – 9, 10 and 11 – were all on the scrubby, slippery slopes.  The thing was, you could see the flags from the bottom, so there was absolutely no navigation at all, and I am still trying to figure out what purpose these controls served, in a sprint.  There was plenty of campus that they could have used instead.

Worse, a lot of the courses did these same legs in reverse, so not only was I plodding upwards increasingly slowly, but I had to continually get out of the way of speeding traffic coming straight towards me – a huge no-no in course planning.

Those bush legs took me 11 minutes of struggle and cursing.  I was determined to finish though, as I wasn’t going to be beaten just because the course planner was an idiot.  Finally back on flat ground, I completed the last few controls, which mostly consisted of a run right around the oval (again, pointless).  Of course I was the slowest finisher by some margin.

I heard a lot of complaints about lack of information that would have led people to wear suitable footwear.  And looking at the results, we could see that the courses were too long, with winning times blowing out in many classes.  The Womens 75 class, who are on my course, really struggled, with a couple of them out there for an hour.  Certainly not what was advertised. 

Ted was called up for “jury duty”, in his role as an IOF advisor.  There were two protests about the mapping. Both were valid, but the jury decided that they had no bearing on the results.  It meant a very long day for Ted and Margi, but at home we could open the windows and enjoy the fresh breeze from the lake.  I could even smell the sea.

My map (two sides):