C-c-c-cold run

I don't believe the thermometer sitting on my desk in my home-office. It says it is 15C. I don't think so. I've put it on the windowsill and it still says 15C. I believe the weather service.

7C at 16h48, when I was out running, with windchill dropping the temp further. Ja, today has been frikkin' cold. But, nothing that long tights, thermal long sleeved top, running shell and two Buffs (onc around my ears and one around my neck) couldn't handle.

It was harder to get out the door today than Saturday but luckily I did not to have to brave the heavy rains of yesterday morning nor the drizzle of this morning. Just an overcast sky and a cold wind. Brrr... I selected a cold-looking, cyan colour for today's Google Earth track.

Still, by getting out to do my Day 24 run I felt badass, like the honey badger, who also runs all over the place (if you haven't watched this YouTube video, do so - it is very, very funny).

Bring on Day 25.

Missing manhole cover mission

Missing manhole covers pose a serious risk to walkers, runners and pedestrians - and it is one of the reasons I don't always run on pavements/sidewalks, especially at night. The metal manhole covers are regularly stolen, to be sold to scrap metal places. It is really difficult for the municipality to keeps tabs on the many, many manholes because covers are there one day and gone the next.

Earlier this year a man fell into a sewerage-filled manhole in a suburb only a few kilometres from me. Three weeks after the incident he was still fighting the bacterial infection that resulted from infected wounds - never mind the horror of falling into sewerage!  I've heard of people stepping into holes and fracturing a leg or severely bruising and wounding flesh.

I have a really superb DA councillor in my area, Michele Clark. The cover of a deep hole was missing for a week, maybe more, on the pavement near home. Michele's team replaced the cover within 24 hours of receiving our report. I've now started on a 'manhole mission' to report missing covers and broken drain covers when I see them during runs.

I take a Google Map and put a red x on the location of the missing manhole. Michele dispatches her team from the Ekurhuleni Municipality to replace the cover.

Cement covers are popular replacements because there's no value in stealing them. In my email I try to specify whether the cover is round or rectangular and where it is (on the road or pavement). There are different types of drains and holes so I hope that this gives them a bit of an idea of what kind of cover they need to take to fix it.

Find your municipal representative in your area and be proactive in your approach to this problem instead of waiting for them to come across it by chance. It will get fixed a lot faster if you notify them.

25th donation

This morning I made my 25th blood donation at my local SANBS donor centre. With June being 'Blood Donor Month', it was kinda fitting to hit this milestone. Regular readers may recall that I set out on a mission two years ago, to regain my 'regular blood donor' status after too many years of not donating - often in malaria areas, neglectful...

Just remember, that while you feel like a hero when you attend a blood donation drive, in order for all of your blood components to be used, you do need to be a regular donor - that means that you need to donate at least three times a year (you can donate every 52 days, so that pretty much makes for a maximum of six donations a year). See blood donor drives as an opportunity to start achieving regular donor status as opposed to a once-off contribution.

14 June is World Blood Donor Day; if you're able to donate, give your pint. The SANBS website (www.sanbs.org.za) lists fixed donor sites and mobile drives.

Blood is composed of several different elements, namely red cells, plasma and platelets, each of which fulfils a particular function. These can be used for specific purposes so that each unit of blood can be used for more than one patient. The more regularly you donate, the better the chance of your donated unit getting used for all components.

SANBS has found that its regular donors are its safest donors. These people are familiar with the danger of the window period and they know what risk behaviour entails. They have been through all SANBS’s education processes.

 If you are donating blood for the first time, your red blood cells won’t get used. Your plasma gets quarantined until your next donation. If all tests come back negative after your second donation, the quarantined plasma from your first donation will be used. This also applies if you haven’t donated blood for a while.

Once you have made three donations and your blood still tests negative for sexually transmissible diseases, all the components of your blood gets used. You have to donate blood regularly!

O' dear... a little rusty

I have been waiting in anticipation for the colour-coded orienteering events to start again.

To explain, the orienteering season here is year-round. The year starts with short-course events. These are usually held at venues with really runnable terrain, like schools and parks. Lots of lawns, fields, flowerbeds, parking areas, paths, roads and buildings. You need to think quick and run fast. The navigation is pretty easy, only made a little challenging by the pace. The longer course is probably up to four kilometres; the planners look at a 20 minute winning time.

Colour-coded courses, on the other hand, are so named because a number of courses are offered and they're 'labelled' according to colour, where yellow is the shortest (2km) and easiest (controls on paths, visible as you approach) and brown is the longest (usually around 10km and up to 16km at a Long O) and most technical in navigation (controls not visible as you approach, fine navigation, not on paths/junctions etc). Blue is one below brown and navigation difficulty is similar but distance is slightly less.

Last year I didn't make many of the colour-coded events because of clashes with other races so it was with delight that I headed off to the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria on Sunday for my first CC events in... well.. umm... eight or nine months! And it showed in my kuk outing.

Here's how it went...

First, we had to draw in the controls off a master map. This is in the red pen that you can't really see. After scanning in the map I drew the controls in on computer, with lines linking them. The yellow dotted line is the route I thought I ran, from memory of my surroundings. The yellow/green line with black border is from my iGot-U GPS logger, put together on QuickRoute software.

Control 6 to Control 7
Hmmm... Options were to go East from 6, along the path and then head South on the less defined path towards 7; OR to cut across the open ground and bash through the vegetation (green) to 7. I took the latter option, which actually seems to have been not too bad. It seems that the less defined path was quite non-existant in places and others had a worse time of it than me.

I purposefully aimed off, thinking that it may be difficult to hit 7 straight on and also reading 'clearings' - of sorts - within the vegetation would be difficult. My objective was to make it through the bushes and to hit the path uphill of the control and to then attack it from open, grassy ground. I did veer a little too far off, but the stone wall gave me a perfect fix on my location. I heard lots of voices around here - many runners battled to find 7. I saw Piers and Michael at this control.


Control 7 to Control 8
Should have been really easy. And, in fact, my route was pretty direct.
When I got to where I thought the control should be, I couldn't see it.

As you can see from my track, I was within five metres of the control initially. I then moved towards the forest and worked my way back again. *sigh* Some minutes lost here because I didn't go North enough - to me it seemed like the control was more in the vegetation and a bit more North than where I'd put it on the map. Easy to lose minutes with this kind of thing. When I did see it I could have fainted; I'd been so close on first approach and would have see it if I'd looked to my left. Doh!

Control 11 and Control 12
Very inelegant - both of these.

Let's deal with 11 first. I made a good line up to the control. Should have been easy but for the grass, which stood higher than my head. I had a feeling that I was a bit too far to the left (only a few metres, it seems) but was not certain how far I'd deviated. So, I headed up to the road to confirm my East-West orientation and then turned down into the grass to hit the control. Again, it was one of those time wasters.

12... oh dear. Messy. I leave 11 and head slightly downhill, contouring. I landed on a very good path, which I thought was the one just above 12. Then - and this is the really silly part - I didn't have much to go by to indicate when I should leave the path, turn left and head for 12. So, I look up and see a telephone wire type setup overhead. Yay, I think. I look on my map and see the black line (the one 'running through' the tree - green circle). So, I run until I get under the lines and then think that I need just run a little more before turning off. And then, BAM, I hit an unexpected junction of paths.

Orienteers reading this will realise my error... The black line is a North-South line, not a power line! In fact, there were no powerlines indicated on the map at all. North-South lines are usually blue and because I had my map folded into a little square and my mind was apparently absent, I made such a stoopid mistake. Took me a while to realise what a moron I was!

When I got near 12 there were a bunch of people looking for it, too much to the West. I moved a little to the side and we nailed it.

Control 16
Looking at this same map above... 16 was a nightmare for many. The only saving grace was that I lost less time than some others from 15 to 16; 15 minutes for me, 28 for Piers, 29 for Tony, 26 for Cindy... It should have been an easy control but with grass higher than my eyeballs, it was really hard to find the control on a rock. And, I'll add that I think the control was in the wrong place, a little too high. You can see this from my track - where the track is and where the control is marked on the rocks indicated on the map. And, indeed, there were rocks where drawn on the map. I took a bit of a grid-search approach, walking through the grass in the surrounds to find the control. *sigh*

Control 18
My last 'nasty' was control 18 - and, again, it shouldn't have been. How many times do I have to learn not to trust a soul and not to listen to a word they say?

So, Tony and I leave 17. He's just ahead of me. We bash through the bushes, trying to keep in semi-open ground. We hit the path and I look left, expecting to see a cliff there, which I do. We run up to it. The control was indicated as being at the top of the cliff. As we get there Wiehan comes running from the top of the cliff, on to the path and says he's been looking for it but hasn't found it.

So, I think that I've bloopsed and that I ended up higher on the path that I thought and that I should have turned right on to the path, not left. I'm also checking the vegetation and thinking that maybe we're too much in the open. So, we all head down the path and into the more green vegetation. I find another rocky cliff and head into the bushes to check on top of it. I get tangled in thorn trees and have to fight my way out. I get back on to the path thinking that it must be at the first cliff just as Tony arrives to confirm this. Wiehan must have passed within a metre of it and just hadn't seen it.

I ran 10km and it took me *sigh* just over two hours. Sarah Pope won the Brown course for ladies in 1:44 ;)

Orienteering 1, Lisa 0.

This is what keeps me coming back to orienteering after 12 years in this sport... ;)

So, weekend of the 18 and 19 June is Gauteng Orienteering Champs with middle distance on the Sat and long distance (my favourite) on the Sunday. Unfortunately we've only had one colour-coded event to get into the groove, which I'm evidently not in yet! I best keep my thinking cap on for the next week and a bit to get my mind in the right frame.

Thursday, 16 June is a public holiday. The juniors are hosting a night event at Wits on Thursday night. That's going to be fun running around campus at night. It's a fundraiser for the Junior World Champs. And Jeremy, who has been orienteering in France - with varying degrees of success (blog posts with photos and videos of running in snow on RSA Orienteers blog) - is hosting a fundraising event for the National O Team at Golden Harvest Park (near the Dome/Northgate) from noon on Thursday. It includes an 'ad hoc' relay, which should be fun.