The Norwegians are claiming it’s spring here but with the temperature hovering around 5 degrees and not many leaves out on any of the trees I’m definitely still in winter mode. We went down to Halden for the Norwegian Spring orienteering meet today, which seemed a pretty big competition. Thankfully I’d opted for long rather than elite as this was my first outing in Norwegian terrain for sometime (with the exception of the sprint round the local woods in the Oslo City Cup last Tuesday). It wasn’t my best result ever (15th out of 25), most probably due to my lack of rock climbing/descending practice in the past few years. I was a bit of a wimpy weed.
I’m not sure whether it’s better to get to the end of the course and have a fairly poor result but not to have made any massive mistakes or to have had one or two bad legs. My main problem was the terrain, which was far more physical than anything you get in the south of England. After a couple of legs where I was clambering up and down wet rock, I started to forget that I was meant to be running and fell into ambling mode.
Anyway, there was some consolation as Dave was even worse! Emma and I had a pleasant couple of hours waiting for him to get back before driving all the way home to Oslo. Unfortunately Emma seems a bit too interested in the scenery in her face-the-front car seat so she doesn’t seem to sleep very well in the car any more, which made the evening quite noisy!