This year's Middle Distance Championships were held on Zajnat, which is a notorious piece of forest full of unkempt, fire and storm damaged steep hills in which progress is extremely slow. As you can see from the map my course was rather short, but the steepness and roughness of the terrain (plus a rather serious cockup of the brain failure type) made me produce 20 minute km's. I still ended up with a medal (I hope!) and it could have been silver without the senior moment mentioned above. The uncertainty over the medal is due to us leaving before the results ceremony on account of our Canadian guest arriving (more about that later). The rules around here state that only citizens with an ID card and/or a passport attesting to full blown citizenship can become champions. This means that Klari who lives in Transylvania and is a Romanian citizen can't receive a medal. As she won, the medal should go to 2nd, 3rd and 4th (that's me), but I'll find out what happened when I next meet my friend whom I asked to take and keep safe my bronze medal, should I get one.
The brain fade occurred between 6 and 7, although it is not very visible on the route I have drawn on. I hope they'll put it on Route Gadget, then I can advertise my senility to all and sundry!! I took a stupid route out of 6 and ended up in a jungle of bramble (I am still carrying the scars!), then I regained the proper route and ended up in the rough open around the cairn. However, I couldn't see it, so I convinced myself that I have overshot it and turned left, result of which was to arrive back at the previous control. At that moment a long, thorny branch had knocked off my glasses which I could only finally find with the help of others round me. At that moment sanity returned and I executed the leg from 6 to 7 fast and accurately, but with 4-5 minutes gone, which was totally aggravating, considering that I only lost silver medal by and minute and a half. In fact, en route to 7 I managed to spot what I thought was a cairn on the map and which was a 4 inch high square concrete post exactly where I went barmy the first time round. Well, such is life. It is getting fairly obvious that I am going rapidly doolally as well as physically decrepit. Having said that, I am still amongst the better ones navigationally as 4th out of 10 was not that bad, and nearly 3rd on something as hard both technically and physically as this was.
Once we got home, thankfully I managed to have a shower and get myself together before Ed arrived. His uncle delivered him safely and he said a very emotional good bye to him. This is only his second visit to family from his Canadian homeland and he was quite touched by the notion that he never knows when, where and even if he will ever see them again. He managed to get a good night's sleep with my teddy bears in the box room and after finding out on the Internet about a variety of places to see and buying his coach ticket to the airport next Sunday, he set off for his sight seeing visit about an hour ago. I hope he has a good day out and will fill us in on his adventures tonight.
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