The final event of the Oceania Carnival was the Relays Championship.  I was allocated into an M45 team with John and Ari from ACT.  We were all quite happy with this as we were all of a similar speed and none of us were particularly competitive, particularly after Ari damaged his ankle in the Australian Long Distance the day before.  We had been expecting that it would take us each about an hour and so Ari, who was running the third leg, was under no illusions that he would be off in the mass start as it was only 90 minutes after the main first leg start.  John had a good first leg and handed over to me in just over 50 minutes.  I had a good start to my course but, once again, one leg caught me out.  This time it was the leg from 5 to 6.  After navigating to the track, I contoured around the hill clockwise when, in retropect, anti-clockwise would probably have been a better choice.  Upon reaching the vicinity of the control I was confused by the presence of an unmapped ant-hill (the only one on the map in that area being conveniently placed as an attack point for the control) and in the end I had to descend the hill to the track to the north to relocate.  There after the controls were fairly easy to find and I completed my run in about an hour.  Ari's ankle had healed so he was able to run a competitive leg and we finished in fifth place.  M45 was won by the official New Zealand team of Greg Barbour, Pete Swanson and Al Cory-Wright.
Jonty was in an M16 team with Cameron Metherill and Matthew Turner (Tane running up in the official ANZ Challenge team).  They finished a creditable seventh in a very strong field.

The link to results from the Oceania website isn't working at the time of writing but they can be found on Orienteering Australia's website here.
Likewise, split times can be found on the same website here.

The Australian Long Distance Champs shared an event centre and finsh control with the Oceania Sprint Champs the previous day (and indeed, with the Oceania Relays the next day also).  I was getting more used to dealing with rocks by now and had a solid start to my run.  My biggest problem came with the long leg from 7 to 8.  Coming out of the control I hit the track and turned right, only noticing my error when I saw the out of bounds clearing and buildings ahead of me.  I cut down through the bush to the track heading south east across the leg and followed this down all the way to the clearing just before the fence.  At this stage, I contoured around the hillside and found the control relatively easily.  In retrospect, however, having got as far as the clearing I should have followed the easier running along the fenceline and then cut back into the control from the south.  Pete Swanson, who won this event, made the same mistake as me with the initial track but recovered much better, attacking the control across the hillside from the loop track to the north of the control.  The remaining controls were quick to find although I did make a parallel error heading to 9 which I was easy to correct once the clearing unexpectedly appeared.  I finished in 21st place, giving up a mere 10 seconds to John Robertson.
Jonty had another top 10 finish in a very strong field.

The results can be found on the Oceania event website here.
Splits can be found in text format here.
Some photos, courtesy of Phillip Herries, can be seen on Picasa here.

For the last three events of the Oceania Orienteering Carnival, the action moved across the Snowy Mountains to near Cooma, just south of Canberra.  We rented a cottage on the outskirts of Berridale and were entertained on the first evening by a mob of 20 -30 kangaroos on the hillside above the cottage.
The first event of the weekend was the Oceania Sprint Champs.  Unusually for a Sprint event it was held not in an urban environment but rather in the forest.  Given that we used the same patch of forest over the next two days, I would have preferred an urban map in Canberra for the variety.  The course was straightforward enough and I made only a few small errors, costing mere seconds each time, but my time of 18 minutes was only good enough for 20th place and represented 10 minute kilometre pace.  It was telling that I was nearly four minutes behind John Robertson who had been complaining of injuries and a cold before the race; clearly I am not in the same form I was in at the last Sprint The Bay (when I finished around a minute behind John in every event).

The results are available from the Oceania event website here.
Splits are available in text format here.

For the Australian Relay Champs I was in an M35 team with Alistair Cory-Wright from Christchurch and Sean Bardsley from Wellington.  Al ran the first leg for us and had an outstanding run handing over to me in first place, two minutes ahead of Pete Swanson.  I lost those two minutes at the second control where Jeff Greenwood caught and passed me.  I wasn't able to hold on to him over the saddle to 3 and he disappeared into the distance.  However, while attacking control 5 from the bend in the track to the east of the control, I saw him only 100m ahead.  Throwing caution to the wind I sprinted up the spur and down the other side.  Of course, he was nowhere in sight and, sadly, neither was the control nor any other features I could recognise.  I spent some time blundering around - finding both 193 and 195 but not 194 - before relocating of the spur to the south of the control and finding it exactly where it should be.  The rest of the course was less problematic and I handed over to Sean in fourth place, 10 minutes before the mass start.  Meanwhile Pete, Jeff and Rob Jessup went on to win M35 for New Zealand and Auckland Orienteering Club.
Jonty was in an impressive M16 team with Tane Moore from North West and Cameron Metherill from Christchurch.  Tane ran the first leg and mucked up the same control as me, handing over to Jonty in fourth place.  Jonty had a clean fast run and was able to hand over to Cameron with a lead of just over a minute.  Cameron increased the lead and they finished as Australian Champions!  For Jonty, this meant he was an Australian Champion before ever winning a New Zealand Championship.

The results for this event can be found on the Oceania website here.
Winsplits are not available but split times in text format are here.

For the midweek events, we relocated to near Wagga Wagga.  We stayed in The Church, a church turned into a holiday rental in Yerong Creek.  The events were about a 75 minute drive away in the Murraguldrie State Forest.  The first event was the Burngoogee Bush Bash which actually was a public race in the afternoon on the courses used for the Australian School Champs in the morning.  The day was fine and hot but a couple of weeks earlier a storm had washed out the access road meaning that we had a 1.5km walk each way from the car park to the event centre.
I started off confidently, spiking the first two controls and catching and overtaking Jeff Greenwood in the process.  Convinced that I now had granite terrain sussed, I then proceeded to muck up controls 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.  I lost a lot of time at 7 when I descended the wrong spur (I had attacked off the obvious bend on the track to the south west of the control).  From 8 onwards I was back in control and found it fairly straightforward although the hill climb up to 11 was long and frustrating, particularly as the control was in sight for most of it.
My time of 1hr 45min saw me finishing near the tail of the field and nearly 12 minutes behind Jonty in the only race of the week where we competed on the same course.

The results for this event can be found on the Oceania website here.
Winsplits are not available but split times in text format are here.

After the atrocious weather of the previous day, it was a pleasant surprise to wake to a beautiful, fine, warm day.  The walk to the start wasn't encouraging as the organisers helpfully provided a snippet of the race map for us to peruse on the way to the start and I had great difficulty matching what I could see on the ground with what was on the map.  Once running, however, it all clicked into place and I had my best result of the week finishing in the top half of the field.  The map was very detailed and it was important to stay in contact the whole time.  Luckily, there were lots of tracks (the same map would be used for the Oceania MTBO Champs a couple of weeks later) and so it was possible to move at running pace for much of the time.  This map was completely different to all the other maps we ran on during the Carnival and people either loved it or hated it.
Jonty also had his best individual run of the week with a fifth place finish.

The results for this event can be found on the Oceania website here.
Split times can be seen at Winsplits.
Route choices can be compared at Route Gadget.  I did have a go at putting my route up but realised that I didn't have a clue how I'd done some of the legs so gave up.  Sorry.
And, as a special bonus, check out the Trac Trac site which shows GPS tracking for the Elites. Both Mens and Womens are available.

And so to Australia for the nine day Oceania Orienteering Carnival.  We flew into Melbourne the previous day, admired the arrangements for that day's Grand Final Parade, had lunch at St Kilda Beach and then drove three hours to our pre-booked farmstay accommodation just south of Wangaratta - only to discover that we had been double booked!  There followed a couple of hours enjoying afternoon tea courtesy of the hosts parents while our hosts desperately rang around trying to find us other accommodation.  Finally, they found an alternative in the Upper King Valley about an hour away so we finally arrived there, after dark, some eighteen hours after leaving home.
The Saturday of the Oceania Long Distance Champs dawned rainy and cold and the weather deteriorated from there.  It was so bad that David refused to get out of the car and chose not to run his course.  It was also the occasion of two significant firsts for me: I was using a thumb compass for the first time and it was my first real experience with Australian Granite terrain.  The thumb compass was an immediate success - I should have bought one years ago - but the Granite was not so good.  I spent over an hour figuring out how to read the map and struggling around the first seven controls and less than an hour from there to the finish with my confidence and speed improving at each control.  This meant that I didn't come last but I didn't do much better than that.  A model event the day before would have helped me, I think.
The long leg from 6 to 7 is worth mentioning.  I did the first two thirds of the leg at a fast pace along the stream and then heading due south up the intermittent watercourse (anything but intermittent that day, I can tell you) following two elite women and a kangaroo.  My troubles began as I left the watercourse and headed up he hillside to the west.  I found the series of bare rock confusing and ended up missing the control - probably not by much, in hindsight - by passing to the east of it.  It was at this time that the longest, heaviest, coldest period of rain of the day began.  After recognising I had gone too far and blundering around a bit I decided to relocate off the track and hill to the south of Control 8 which thankfully turned up right where I expected them to be.  To confirm I was in the right spot I ran down the track and found Control 8 and then navigated from there back to 7 (and then back to 8, of course).
So what could I have done better?  My route choice was OK if I had had more experience with that sort of terrain and, indeed, much of the time I lost was due to me standing around looking at my map uncertainly.  However, on the day I would have been better to follow the same route that Jonty took on his equivalent leg; following the main stream most of the way and then using the obvious kink as an attack point.

The results for this event can be found on the Oceania website here.
Split times can be seen at Winsplits.
Route choices can be compared at Route Gadget.  Sadly, by the time I had access to a computer, too much time had passed for me to remember my whole route so I haven't updated my run.
And, as a special bonus, check out the Trac Trac site which shows GPS tracking for the Elites. Both Mens and Womens are available.