Training Log Archive: PhilW

Nice and easy warm up. Followed pretty well. Main mess up, was when I was looking for some big rock structures in a marshy area, and one of the other guys called me up to the top of the hill and told me I was supposed to be up there. I looked, and sure enough he seemed to be right...sweat had dripped onto my glasses and I was having a hard enough time reading the map...so I took his word for it. It turns out he was doing the long circuit, which I did next...and I had been in the proper area according to my GPS trace...but I don't remember seeing the rocks. There were rocks matching what I could make out of my map there.

Took it easy on this one. In the back of my mind I thought I might try to run one of the races tomorrow. 4 bad booms, which only 2 I can blame on the old map. One the pit next to the rock wasn't really visible on the map. I finally saw the brown ink to the sides of the rock after enlarging it with my slide loupe at home. The other map problem were all of the unmapped ditches and trails, extration trails etc. Those I got used to, after the line O more or less. The big boom was on #4 which on the map looked pretty straight forward with 4 horizontal ditches stacked...but it sure didn't look like it on the ground to me.
Sometime after #9 I did something to my right knee. Nothing noteworthy happened. I guess I twisted it in the rocky area, but I don't remember doing it. The other booms were a parallel error on one ditch then a stupid decision, based on the contours-I didn't see any elevation change at the top of the hill, and it looked like the control was at the western edge of the top of the hill...so I looked west instead of following my instincts and going east.

Really reading well until#10 where I got totally off. Ran right past the circle and into no man's land. Never did recover and took a DNF