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Bivouac Night Nav Series

The Bivouac Night Nav Series was made up of 3 events held at Vic Park, Spencer Park and Halswell Quarry.


I went in to the first event expecting to do well due to my recent results at rogaines and my improvement in running form over the last few months. But man did I get a wake up call! I struggled to find check points accurately and wasted a lot of time not taking direct routes. In the end I finished in a very average 12th place with a 20 point penalty for returning late.


The second event was held at Spencer Park and I knew this would be a tough event for me as I had never done any navigation in a forest before and the organisers had decided to give us an orienteering map (which I had never looked at before) instead of the standard topo map. It actually started reasonably well for me, finding the first 10 check points fairly quickly and easily, it was after this that I got mega disorientated and began wasting lots of time. By the time I worked out where I was, I had very little time to get back to the finish and was the furthest from it that I could possibly be. Once again I got a 20 point penalty, except this time I was back in 19th place.


Going into the final event, I knew I had to sort my crap out and have a good race. Despite my legs feeling really heavy and barely running through the event, the determination to do well obviously worked as I ended up finishing in 4th place, with yet another 20 point penalty preventing me from 3rd!

The surprising part out of all the series was the fact that I managed to score enough points in the final event to bump me up to 5th overall for the series. Not bad considering how average the first 2 events went for me.

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