What's black and blue and goes splat in the woods?

I have to say that my feet are hurting a little more today than they do on an average Monday. But then again, yesterday I did a little more footwork than I would on an average Sunday. But, as I've mentioned once before, I'm trying to get back in shape, and I've decided to compete in the 8-hour version of the E2C adventure race. And so in preparation, my team mate and I decided to do mini-E2C this weekend. Now I spend my share of time in the woods. Well, more than average, anyway, but this weekend was especially gruelling.

I should have known it was coming. But I didn't. I was in blissfully disillusioned, thinking that we'd be prancing around forests with relative ease. That expectation was rudely shattered 15 minutes into the 5 hour race when I found myself fording a knee-deep, forty-foot wide, ice-cold, rushing stream. That's when I put the pieces together and realized the implications of having a former national orienteering champion as a team mate for the race.

At 9:15, instead of frying up eggs and sipping coffee, I was drenched from the waist down in 5-degree weather.

We crossed the stream, made our way to a the edge of a lake, and cut into the woods looking for our first checkpoint. A mere 20 minutes into the race were there. Things were looking good.

All we had to do next was bush-whack in a straight line for about one mile to intersect a road. My team-mate, who I must say has the uncanny ability to slip through the densest forest like a freaking deer on speed, was flying. I barely looked at my compass or map as I tried to keep up. When we finally emerged from the brush on a road, I had no idea where we were. That confusion was not helped by the map. The logging roads in the real world trailed away from intersections at fastly different compass bearings than the ones on the map. Some took sudden 90-degree turns that weren't on the map. All this made it very difficult to figure out where we were, and we walked aimlessly on these roads for about an hour before determining our position. By then we were about 5 km from where our planned route would have us so we made a new plan, and quickly (i.e. in the 90 minutes) found two more check-points. With two hours to go, we had found less than 1/3 of the checkpoints. We went back into the woods and started bush-whacking, but because we were looking for a trail that didn't exist, we spent the next 90 minutes covering about 4 km in the thick woods. By the time we came to a trail, we had 30 minutes to cover 5 km (on roads now) to get to the finish line before running out of time. There was one more check-point right near the end of the course, so our final score was 4/10, unlike the 7 or 8 we had hoped for.

But I learnt some lessons. (1) Even though the course was built for GPS users, we had decided not to bring any because that would be cheating. Next time, I should either take a GPS or not do a race like that. (2) Even if it's a bad map, you have to trust it. (3) If you sign up to run through the woods with a deer, you're going to get your ass kicked by the forest.