Orienteering race 2:10:00 [2] *** 9.0 mi (14:27 / mi)
spiked:5/17c
So you know what happens when you don't do O for, oh, eight months and then you run a 7+ km course? You get lost in the woods and wind up running 9 miles! After deciding not to go ski this morning (sleeping in after yesterday's debacle) I went to the O meet. I carpooled with Alex (yay, carpooling!) and then proceeded to make it back just before the time cutoff. And then the SI stick I'd borrowed from Ed didn't quite download right (it downloaded all my splits, but had some extra nonsense on it. So that was a thing.
Controls:
1—ran the trail, then got cute through the woods, but found.
2—horror show. 24 minutes of wandering around. According to Strava I made four loops around the control and only found it with some help from Alex who had warmed up beforehand. The map wasn't great for this, with nonexistent trails and such, but I looked too low, then too high. Then too low. Ugly x1000. 18 minutes, and it seemed longer.
3—Road. Found pretty easily. The footprints through the snow didn't hurt (yeah, some snow on certain shaded areas and aspects).
4—Did this one okay. Wandered around a little but I was still finding my back to reading terrain and features.
5—Goofed this up too, but not as badly as #1. I found a trail, and ran to the area, and found some extra trails, and wandered around for about 8 minutes, until some other guys wandered in to the area, and we found the control.
6—Ran with others. Not spiked, but not too bad.
7—My kind of control! Find some trails and run them. Outran one of the other guys, and found the control pretty easily. Feeling better about myself.
8—Navigated well! Read terrain! Found the control where it was supposed to be! Exciting!
9—Decided to take the trail around, but go so jazzed about trail running I ran right past the attack point. By about two minutes. Then had to read the terrain to find it, which was ugly. But it was where it was supposed to be (shocking)
10—Overran this on a trail, then backtracked to find a pretty faint stone wall.
11—Ran to the road, cut in, found the esker, found the rock. Sort of.
12—Spiked. Pretty excited.
13—Almost spiked. For me, totally spiked. Second rock I looked behind.
14—Spiked coming across the road.
15—Found the trails, ran to the hill, found the hill, and misread the cue sheet. But not by that much.
16—Tried to get cute, instead got stupid. Got totally lost, then figured out where I was, then ran some trails and stuff.
17—This one I found pretty well (left cliff, hey look a control), and then ran to the finish.
So, yeah. Running in the woods is fun. And this was good practice, by the end I was definitely not having my stupid wander around the woods aimlessly for 20 minutes looking for controls (they seemed easier, but I think I was just getting more back in to the swing of things). Park-O should help, as should some O this spring. Going in to the Billygoat having done a real map should make it much easier than last year, when I 20-minuted a control there pretty early on. Anyway, playing in the woods is fun, my legs hurt, and I have to play with Birkie data. But it's so beautiful out I might ride bikes instead. (Or clean the kitchen.)