Orienteering

As a larger girl you would think that I would have learned my lesson of what I can do with my body. Apparently, that is not the case. I have a very adventurous side to me so I decided to go orienteering on Saturday morning. If you know me you would have to know that I must have REALLY wanted to do this because it involved me being somewhere at 9am on a Saturday. I normally like to sleep till 10am and I don’t like to make commitments before noon.

Orienteering is a sport where you use a compass and a map to hike around the woods looking for flags and then you punch your card to show that you reached the flag. I struggled using the compass…I couldn't seem to get the hang of it. Reading the map was also a struggle. It wasn’t a normal map. There were several keys indicating what type of terrain you might encounter around the park, like bogs, hills, trails and ponds. At the beginning of the second course I separated from my friend to go to the bathroom and when I came out I couldn’t find her. I had to call her and we realized we were in the same parking lot…we just couldn’t see each other. I defiantly don’t want to go to the woods by myself.

So we got through the first course in 45 minutes and fairly easily. This was the beginner course and you were basically walking around on marked trails. We then took the second course which was a bit more difficult. You had to pay more attention to the map and think about where you were going to go next. As an example the most direct route to the next flag may be through swampy water, as I wasn’t interested in getting all wet we needed to plot our way around that area. As a side note, we encountered a fellow orienteer who decided to take the direct route and she was completely wet up to her knees. I guess she was trying to go fast or…just couldn’t read the map. So we finished the second course in 1 hour and 4 minutes. The website hasn’t posed our results yet...but I will let you know how we compare to the other teams.

So after we were done orienteering I decided to go to Home Depot to buy some lawn improvement items. I bought four perennial flowers, a bush and some mulch. So after an hour of rest and TV I decided to go to the front yard dig holes and redo my front flower bed. It was two hours of very physical work. I worked up lots of sweat and I had dirt and mulch all over me. When I was done I had dirt smeared all over my shirt.

So I now come to the part of knowing my body. It is still hard for me to walk today. My hamstrings and calf’s are so sore and tight it is still difficult to walk on Monday. Perhaps I could have waited to do the lawn work on Sunday?? I hope my body recovers soon. I do not like to have physical limitations; I just want to be able to do anything. Is that too much to ask?