It was a fairly windy arrival into Wellington on Saturday morning! The pilot informed us before landing that there was 55kt headwinds and to sit back and enjoy the ride into Wellington! By the time we landed my palms were saturated with sweat and I felt a little bit airsick.

Up the road a bit the weather wasn’t much better in Kapati, so from 20 deg C and sunny at 6am in Chch it was 13 deg C and freezing cold in up there. Luckily for the sprint event there was a break in the weather perfectly timed and we managed to run around without getting wet. It wasn’t a very technical sprint which meant it was fast and furious. I wasn’t feeling too fast and made a 20 sec mistake right near the end leaving me with 3rd place when it was all said and done.

In the afternoon the rain increased an being up a bit higher it was a bit colder too… I had to crank out my one and only polyprop and Im glad I did. We all spent a bit longer out in the jungle during the middle distance, on a really cool map…. if it was sunny, but it was wet and very dark in the forest. I had a good start but things soon fell apart and just as I was getting a handle back on things I caught Matt, and with the extra distraction we bumbled about missing on two or three controls consecutively. Eventually I got back on some sort of track but the fight had gone and I stumbled home. To my surprise, considering the minutes lost I wasn’t too far off the pace, picking up a fourth place.

The next day the weather got worse…I think it was worse anyway. A couple of real intense hail storms came rolling through and added to this was a bit of a delayed start. Today I was focused on planning ahead and it worked well for the most part. I fell apart on a couple of controls due to poor attackpoints and generally lacked some speed around the course. I was going alright until the second last control where I dropped 2+mins and second place to Matt. So another 3rd…

The flight home was not so bad, much less exciting than the ride up anyway! Not sure what to think of the weekend, orienteering technique definitely needs some tweeking and was generally not happy with my performance. Running wise I guess I’m in the base phase of training so I’m not too concerned with the lack of speed at the moment.