The Middle did not go so well, but I think I knew pretty much what went wrong and how to fix it for the Long and I feel like the Long went a lot better because of what I learned in the Middle.
Starting with control Number 2 I made a pretty big mistake. In this case it was definetly because I spaced out while I was running down the reentrant that leads to number 2 and I had no idea how far I went because I just assumed I would be able to tell where I was on the reentrant by the terrain, but because it was so vague I couldn't really tell.
Since I was already making a mistake at the 2nd control I panicked and made the beginners mistake of running around in circles for several minutes before hitting the road and relocating.
So basically what I learned just from this control was that I need to focus on distance when running linear features especially if its not easy to tell where you are on the feature. And I also remembered that when making a mistake I should not panic and instead just find the nearest thing that makes relocating easy and then just re attack since I could've probably saved 3-4 minutes of time just by doing that.
Anyways,
The problems didn't stop there. I tried not to let screwing up the 2nd control bother me and just continue the race normally, but I ended up making the rookie mistake of trying to make up time by pushing harder and not thinking as much. This led to a lot more mistakes and made my race a lot less focused.
For Number 5 I took a compass off of the edge of the spur leading into Number 5 but got completed dragged off the compass by the wrong reentrant. I've been noticing this problem a decent amount in my orienteering recently and need to work on improving my confidence in my compass since I tend to rely too much on reading the terrain even when taking a good compass.
A had a bunch of clean legs after that which I was pretty happy with since I was up there with the faster runners in terms of splits.
Then came Number 10 which confused me a little bit since I did a pretty good job up until the control circle, but again I didn't know how far I was down the stream and I was worried I'd passed Number 10 since it was in a pit. I think if I just remembered where I crossed the streams and just used distance estimation to get to Number 10 it would've worked a lot better.
Number 11 was a small mistake again with distance estimation I just assumed I had gone far enough when I haven't and was afraid I'd missed it. I think I need to be more confident in my routes before stopping and wondering if I've gone too far.
Number 12 was an absolute disaster again because I wasn't able to understand how far I'd went. For some reason I thought I went WAY too far and had passed number 12 when I really just hit the reentrant I was supposed to cross.
Overall a lot of problems on this course came down to me either not taking a good enough compass or just not being confident and hesitating before reaching the control so in the future I want to work on having much more confidence when attacking into controls.
Map with really tiny route :)
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tj7F2WQaehTdaJqg8