I wanted to do this race today to work on fine-tuning my orienteering. Tomorrow is a national long distance race, so I definitely didn't want to kill myself running at some local event today. I wanted to focus on these things:
- Punching. I had some awful punching at the races two weekends ago, where I was totally expecting to nail the punch as usual, but then miss it and have to double back a few steps.
- Refolding my map. I learned recently that part of taking a good bearing stems from folding parallel to the line. Seeing that I have trouble with compass legs I've been trying it out lately. I'm not sure of its effect on my compassing, but refolding for every leg does make holding the map much less of a hassle.
- Reading ahead. I was very diligent with this at the beginning of the course. I had some solid proactive map reading going. Towards the end I tended to run more retroactively and planned some routes only after leaving the control.
Mostly happy with how I performed, but there were a few bobbles.
3. I should have stayed low enough so that I had to drop into the reentrant only once. Having to climb out of two of those troughs was killer.
5. Crossing the second trail I passed through a gap in the trees, but it was also a logging trail so I thought I was further left. I corrected for this and ended up way far right. Didn't lose too much time, but it was still significant and totally avoidable.
6. It was really green dropping into the control. Could have saved a couple seconds looping around and coming in from the other side.
7. Trail was kinda churned up, and for a second I thought it would be faster to run in the riverbed. Thankfully I realized quickly enough that it's not Ohio and that that's a terrible idea.
9. Didn't have a clear picture of the last part of the leg and had a few moments of hesitation getting near the circle.
12. Definitely didn't have to hook that S at the end of the leg, it wasn't that much climb there that I definitely had to avoid it. I may actually have just added more climb for myself.
20. Saw the straighter option moments too late (what I meant with planning after leaving controls). Was starting to get tired too so I was kinda slow thinking in the cut-line section.
23. Going into Oxygen debt now, completely messed up the compass bearing on this one. Saw the house ahead of me and knew I messed up.
24. Booked it downhill without looking at my compass. Not my best idea.