The Short Champs. Every year I look forward to the Middle distance Champs, as it is my strongest discipline, the one that emphasizes quick decisions and detailed navigation, both of which my reactive style fits well.
The race went just fine until Control 9. I made a couple of small errors, but was moving ahead confidently and the course did not seem hard at all. At #9, though, my race was broken. I misread the control description, totally my fault. But, as I ended up a cliff below the control, I could not relocate because the most obvious relocation feature was covered up by the magenta (not purple) circle. I did a loop.
At the next control, I caught up with Jon Torrance who had passed me at #9. His pace was a tad faster than I was going, and I
put it all together and finished the course fighting, staying mostly ahead of Jon and only making one mistake, bad route choice to the last control.
At the finish and the event-center shelter, the results were coming out looking a touch funny, a few good times and a bunch of mediocre ones quite a way back. It was learned from talking to most Blue runners that more than 50% of them had some issues with Control 9. It seemed that this single control effectively decided the race, which is not an evidence of appropriate planning even though there were no problems with the control site selection and the mapping around it. To me, the leg was significantly harder than the rest, and what I'm trying to say is that probably the rest of the course could have been slightly harder, not necessarily that this particular leg should have been easier. Congratulations to Wil and John who certainly aced #9, through superior skill.
The map printing quality was not good, the colors were way off. The length is preliminary, but the climb is firm, from the Polar.