A taste of my own Metrogaine medicine

The WITSOC bunch (Stephanie, Christie, Sarah P and Sarah) really planned a superb Festive Metrogaine on Saturday. As they did all the work and planning, it was a wonderful opportunity for me to participate.

The route linked orienteering maps of Zoo Lake (start/finish) with Emmarentia (and JHB Botanical Gardens) with a good load of controls all over the place. The map covered a really big area, which gave a lot of options. But, as Emmarentia (the park) was loaded with high scoring controls, if you wanted to really score well, it was pretty much compulsory to head over there.

I'd decided not to head over to Emmies, choosing instead to visit a bunch of controls on the Zoo Lake side of Barry Hertzog. Not a good choice in terms of being very high scoring, but a nice route to run. I guess it doesn't help kinda knowing the suburbs... I didn't feel like running up Westcliff and nor did I want to run up and over to Emmies and then up and over on the way back. Yip... lazy ass ;)

The street part of the map. Big area and lots of controls. Points work according to the control number where 10-19 would be 10 pts each, 20-29 are 20pts each etc.

Looking at the points, if I'd run more directly from Zoo Lake and into Emmies to pick up a couple of controls there and then straight back, I'd probably have collected more points. I think my total was 530 points - not bad in the overall ranking but pretty dismal compared to Timothy Chambers' 1200 (a bit more maybe) points.

My route. A few in-and-outs.

I made two errors on the route. Leaving Zoo Lake I thought that the road I exited on was one lower than where I actually was. This meant that when I got to the corner where my first control should have been on (I'd run one block up - looking at the map I'm not sure what I was thinking...), the house number in the clue didn't match. Fortunately I could see a few blocks up so I realised that I was too high up and had to drop down a block (I was actually on the correct road initially but didn't realise it because I only started looking for the house when I got to the next corner).

On the home stretch back to Zoo Lake I mis-counted the blocks. I'd counted 'two blocks up' on my map and so that's what I did. But it was actually three blocks up (need new contact lenses?)... Again, the clues didn't match what I found in reality so after another look at my map I realised what a paw-paw I was and corrected.

Zoo Lake controls.

And this is what I missed out on in Emmies. Look at all those 50 and 60 point controls!

I ran about 13km in total. Nice 'n easy.

Metrogaine is a super event format and I enjoyed running around, map in hand. Well done to Stephanie, Christie, Sarah P and Sarah for planning this excellent event.