Hungária Kupa Day 4

Well, I obviously collected up all my mistakes for this day. Control 1 was a children's control and I was in a foul mood already, thinking that if the whole course was going to be like this I would have to have a big row with the planner after my run. Thankfully, the technical quality of the course improved, but I didn't. The long promised heatwave had arrived and my brain never works too well in high heat. Instead of going nicely round the paths to no. 2, I decided to go straight. A few metres into the forest I managed to trip myself up (don't ask for details!!) and landed like a felled piece of timber. The swelling on my right shin was the size of Mount Everest and I also lost my lucky cap, which I had for 8 years. Later I didn't have the energy in all that heat with a large bump on my shin to go back and look for it, but it is fairly certain that I lost it when I fell. Needless to say that I completely lost the plot and made a large detour to no. 2. After this I made a few more mistakes and was convinced that Ágika made up most of my advantage, when it turned out that she made an even bigger mistake on one of the later controls and I beat her again, this time by about 5 minutes. The gap between us was now up to about 21 minutes. No panic for the chasing start on Day 5 then, I thought!

In the afternoon we went to the Museum of the Hungarian Language, which was absolutely fascinating, followed by three caches, one of which was on top of a fair size mountain, accessible by either a long steady climb or a short but horrendously steep one. Have a guess which one I chose? I managed to climb up in 25 minutes, which surprised me a great deal. Mostly for 2 reasons: 1. the large bump on my shin; 2. a still quite bad back coupled with a less than optimum physical state. Well, you never know, do you? The cache was in the neighbourhood of a disused quarry where for centuries they quarried mill stones. It is apparently rhyolite, which is vulcanic in origin and looks terribly like mill stone grit in the North of England. The lake at the bottom of it is rain water, which cannot drain and it was a dramatic scene, where I wished I could have stayed for longer. We had to go for the presentation again for 7pm, followed by another nice meal at the same restaurant Roy liked the night before.