ORIENTEERING

-

 My first competition as an M60 was orienteering in New Zealand. As I am an infrequent orienteer, I spent the first series of races, the Lonely Mountain sprints at New Plymouth, getting back into the swing of things. 

The lonely mountain refers to the solitary Mt Taranaki which we climbed on a non-race day. Not highly recommended. The scree is worse than I remember on Mt Ngauruhoe. Cloudy on top. No views to the sea, but we could just make out Mt Ruapehu in the distance. If I do it again it will be in winter with crampons. Pic is from the summit crater.

Then it was on to Hawke's Bay for the Sprint The Bay carnival.

 


 

 

 The large proportion of overseas orienteers attests to the fun and quality of the program. Here is one of the maps, Sleeping Giant.


 Another interesting feature of this carnival is that there were at least 4 type 1 diabetics competing. I had no idea how many type 1 Kiwis orienteered until lots of us started wearing CGMs and could recognise each other.

In what is hopefully an auspicious start to my participation in M60 sport, I placed first in the M60 green jersey, or sprint competition, and third in the M60 all round competition.

We also visited the South Island, the subject of a future post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Zealand Mountains

-
Image
 On our NZ trip that was the subject of my previous post, Orienteering, we also went up a few hills on the South Island. To warm up we spent a few days running bits of the Kepler Track, before heading to what is arguably NZ's best one day tramp, Gertrude Pass.  Where else can you have an alpine experience with such spectacular views, complete with fall, avalanche, water and weather dangers, without technical climbing, and be back at the car by lunch time?   That afternoon we did the boat cruise on Milford Sound. Next up was Ben Lomond. We went from lake level but you can make it a bit easier by taking the cable car part way up. Then on to the Routeburn Track. The original plan was to do the through trip, but getting transport to the start and from the finish would have been very expensive and time consuming, so we drove to the eastern end and went up to Harris Saddle.  Lunch back at the car after about 25km and 700m of vertical.
Read more

Mental Gymnastics - quick Sudokus with a twist

-
Image
  QUICK SUDOKUS (with a twist) Standard Sudokus can be tedious. They often involve boring repetition of routine techniques until the one interesting step comes along. And unless you have a brain the size of a planet, you need a pen or some other method to keep track of your progress. So I have reduced some diabolical Sudokus from sudokuoftheday.com to their most interesting single step, and forced solvers to find an alternative method of solution by hiding some cell values. If you are unfamiliar with Sudokus I recommend going to sudokuoftheday.com to get the hang of them and learn their rules, some of which are: A Sudoku should have 30 or less initial values filled in out of the 81 total Sudoku should be solvable by entirely logical deduction – no guesses should be needed For aesthetic reasons, a Sudoku should have rotational symmetry – the positions of the initially filled in cells should be the same if you were to turn your page round. The Sudoku mus...
Read more

My M55 Personal Bests

-
  Best Performances from age 55-59 Times in brackets are the open age equivalents. ie the time a 25yo male would need to better to beat me in an age handicapped race. Athletics    60m 8.06    100m 12.78 (10.9) Missed the ACT M55 100m record by 0.04s    200m 26.12 (21.4)    400m 1:02.56 (52.1)    800m 2:38.19 (2:10)    1500m 5:26.00 (4:23)    3000m 11:50.47 (9:43)    10k 42:23.95 (34:42)    Half marathon 1:34:57 (1:20:10)    ACT Masters Athletics Boag Award for male sprinter of the 2018 season. Bouldering    Several benchmark V3s on the Moonboard at age 59 Lead climbing    Grade 17 redpoint (YDS 5.9 or French 5b+) at age 59 Orienteering    1 st place in M55 ACT short distance Champs 2017    Ranked 10 th nationally in M55 by Orienteering Australia in 2015, 2016 and 2017 Ski marathons    Aus ...
Read more