Day 3, and the JOKers had the undeniable luxury of essentially staying at a club hut on the map. Considering that we were on the edge of the city though, we were all suprised at the ruggedness and remoteness of some sections of the map. The dominating features were distinct lines of crags, running directly north-south at around 500m intervals. The forest however was almost universally runnable and very fast, making this the most pleasing “conventional” map of the five days and my personal favourite day.
I only made one serious error on this course, at Control 14. I made a very bad route choice indeed on the leg from 13 to 14, deciding to go over rather than around a hill, but then at the highest point, deciding do “go around” after all and dropping down in the wrong direction. This exhausting climb probably caused the big error around the control. I was search just 50 metres too far to the west of the control, on as it turns out a parallel reentrant. Only the hefty cliffs further to the west stopped me from going even further away, and in fact provided a useful relocation feature.
Some of the legs were really lovely on this course – long but fast sections, such as leg 9-10 shown here, with muddy paths far away but some nice, firm marshes and broken forest to speed through. The earlier sections however were much more rugged, and the regular lines of cliffs provided some serious obstacles – see the extract here on my way to No. 3.
All in all a really beautiful area and it was the one that reminded me most of the excellent, fast terrain over in Stockholm I experienced at the Varsity Match there in 2001.
