To be perfectly honest, here the organisers let us down badly, as for many of the controls there just was no route choice available and we were inventing routes to try it out. Perhaps this did help us define that no matter what we thought, it was invariably the one route choice that lead us correctly and quickly to the control. Every thing else should be left at training.
1. After a nice warm up to the start, the route choice to 1 was simple and in order to make it interesting Bindi decided to run low and come round the bottom of the rocks North of the control. This didn't work and he ended up running the same route as me - no difference here.2. Here I stayed on the contour and Bindi ran over the top on the flatter part. It should have been a no contest, but Bindi was quicker due to my shoes having no purchase. Normally though, stay on the contour.
3. My BIG mistake. Bindi ran straight (normally the only choice) and I was going to run left on the road. Firstly, a run in with deer threw my concentration a little, and then I made the silly error of misreading the map and interpreted a path as a road, thus running higher than planned. Additionally I then made a parallel error when I thought the area above the (nr) 16, was the area to the SW of it. To top it all, when I had discovered the error, instead of just turning around and running the intended route, I ran my mistake out and round the fence to control 3. No more comments here *sleepish grin*
4. We decided on more or less the same route and that threw us. I stayed low until I hit the last but one green (and here I must add to my defence that the map was not quite right - the green/white was badly mapped), saw the depression in green (which I mistakenly thought was the pit in white), thus believing that I was more or less at the correct height and ran over on the contour. Bindi thought that I was more or less correct and he ran after me, and past. I was able to relocate on the open area / steep dip combo and ran back to the control. Bindi did not have so much luck, and spent another 2 minutes looking for the control.
5. With a struggle we figured out two route choices here, one over the top, one round the hill right. Bindi got the correct one, and I the one that was normally not a choice. Added to this was the fact that the map was not great in this area, and that they had set the control on the wrong charcoal burning site, meant I was a lot longer looking for the control than Bindi and only found it when I saw him standing high above me.
6. Again we struggled to find two viable routes and eventually decided on straight line (me) and right over the road (Bindi). Straight line is normally faster and if it wasn't for the fact that I'm so slow on the hills at the moment, so it would have been this time. I was barely able to keep up with Karin and Thea. One lesson learned though, running at an angle over a hang can be very quick and you can make some HM easily in Hungary, especially when the ground is so stony.
7. Here we couldn't find an option and ran together to the control.
I ran back then over the road and let Bindi run on for a few more controls at his own pace. My pace is so slow. Aisha and I came upon a deer, and although she was not on the lead she behaved impeccably and didn't even think about chasing it. She was just as buggered as I was.
All in all a good training with many high meters and a few lessons learned. A quick word to the map. Generally speaking it was not bad in the scale 1:15000, but there were some areas that caused us both a few problems and certainly they were not of EYOC standard. I am sure that the maps will be better for these competitions although Thomas Krejci mentioned that this is normal standard in Hungary.
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