First national meet of the year, and of course it's a night o. I had an interesting experience tonight. First off, the reliable Silva light with seemingly unlimited battery life that I normally borrow wasn't available to me this weekend, so I had to borrow someone else's. The light that I got was a powerful one, but it hadn't been used in a while, and it's one of the "china lights", so the reliability and lifespan were questionable. I hoped it would hold out for 90 minutes, but boy was I wrong.
After an hour of running my light cut out. It didn't even dim down until eventually flickering out or give me a couple warning flashes. I was running up a hill when I was suddenly plunged into darkness.
Okay, I thought, it's probably just a loose battery cable or something. I lost a good 5 minutes taking everything off, checking that it is actually out of battery, and putting everything back on again. Didn't help that I was doing that all to the light of my backup penlight.
80 lumens from this little baby. Except it's powered by a AAA battery, so those 80 lumens only last for about 10 minutes. So it was totally fine for the rest of 15, and I nailed 16, but after that it wasn't really working out too well. I finally decided to quit after spending some 10 minutes lost looking for 20.
I got to the meet 90 minutes before my start, but then lost all that extra time because I had to buy new shoes and a new compass. I made it to the start with a minute to spare. Without a warmup or any time to focus, this race was off to a great start.
1. I should have gone around on the trail. Cutting through didn't save all that much distance, and I was going uphill through thorns and thick green. Taking the safest possible route would have been much smarter, especially because I was flummoxed from almost missing my start and because I usually have trouble at the beginning.
3. 1:15000 playing tricks on me. I didn't see the trail by 2 until it was too late.
4. For some reason I thought going around would be worth the three contours I'd save. Somehow missed the trail junction there too which didn't quite come out right on the gps track.
5. Hadn't taken the time to plan this ahead of time, so I stopped and looked for a route. Going left would have been better because it's flat most of the way and then a climb at the end, and not too far off the line. The route that I took was closer to the line and had a better approach, but there was too much up and down.
7. Came down the open hillside, scrambled over a waist high row of manure lining the trail, and then entered the forest too early and had to scale a giant hill unnecessarily.
8. Unsure entering the control
9. There must have been some type of interference here, because my gps was way off. I followed the river all the way to the trail, then crossed the big ravine by the 4-trail junction. Entering the control I thought it was down in the reentrant while it was actually by the knoll on the other side. I realized this after fighting through the dense green and looking down at the river from a steep and rocky slope. Better route would have been to go to the indistinct trail rather than follow the river, then cross the ravine higher up by the edge of the pink, cross the line of hills and then rounding into the control from the south.
12. Hesitant going into the circle
14. Got off my compass, went almost to the yellow and circled back.
17. Was running on the edge of the hill with some other guys, mostly running on their lights. They had a control earlier than mine, so my confidence evaporated when suddenly I was engulfed in darkness. Went back to the lights, found the wrong control, and followed the hillside to my control.