Today I ran at the second race of the Thomass winter orienteering series, held annually in Ontario. This is a handicapped race with a score element where you miss out controls depending on your age/sex point score. My age wouldn't normally let me miss anything but with it being my first ever Thomass I was able to miss one control.
The rest of the course was a normal 4 km loop in a nice wood. Also, depending on your handicap you started a different distance from the start kite in the mass start, with old ladies about 300m away and M21 1.4 km away, I started about 1.2 km away.
After the start kite was the score element, so I skipped the control 35 m down a steep escarpment that I would have just had to climb straight back up again. After completing this I'd already picked off most people who started infront of me and missed out more but I got the rest soon after. I made a mistake at number 4, not reading the slope direction correctly, and the M21 people caught me. A big train to number 7 but the leader made a mistake at 8 and I slipped away with two other people. It was only 1 km to the finish so a proper race, I beat one of them but couldn't get past the other so finished second.
I enjoyed it, and think it is a really good format for small informal races since it joins the entire field to give more competition. There was a few inches of snow on the ground.
I played some Canadian Football (slightly different rules to American) on Friday night in the snow, it was actually quite fun. I scored a touchdown :)
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