Orienteering race (Long) 1:28:13 [4] *** 6.3 km (14:00 / km) +170m 12:20 / km
Very different from yesterday. Today's map was fast, spur and reentrant orienteering. An excellent course. I was worried that it wouldn't be technical enough and turn into a running race, but judging from the errors people were making, it was plenty technical. Also did a great job of discouraging trail routes. They rarely seemed like the best choice for very far.
The western states champion awards were based on two-day total time and were very cool (little mining pans) so I wanted one. Eileen Breseman was my only competition and she was five minutes ahead of me from day one, so I wasn't very hopeful. I made a pretty decent error from #2 to #3. I climbed up a hill and thought I had climbed more diagonally then I did, so I misjudged where I was on the top of the ridge and went down in the wrong direction, taking me a ways away from the control. When I hit a main road that didn't look like, I spent some time relocating and then got back on track. Time loss - about 3 minutes. Saw Eileen just before #6. Both of us thought that I had caught up to her (turns out she started behind me and had made up 8 minutes already). We took different routes into the control and I was surprised to find it, take a drink and get away without seeing her. Kept going feeling better that I was apparently having a good run. Had a nice clean race from there. it turned out that she made a parallel error at #6 and lost a lot of time. In the end, I got the gold pan!
