Orienteering race 44:40 [4] **
shoes: Silva Pro Lite
Score-o at The Willow's - Never ran on this map before and now I know why. Not that it mattered much, the park that we ran in is not worthy of anything above a yellow and that is all it is typically used for. Nevertheless, I still managed to make some rather stupid mistakes, right at the start I managed to not see two controls at the very edge of the field (and map) in which we were starting and folded my map so that I never noticed that I missed them until I checked my punch card towards the end of the score-o. Fortunately I was able to get all of them well under the hour time limit and finished a 44:40. I think I probably could have run it at around 40 min or just a little over if I hadn't missed those two controls when and had to run an extra loop to get them. Other than that the race just consisted of running from one control circle to the next and just looking around to spot the control, since the circles seemed to be more of a suggestion of where the control is hung rather than pinpointing its exact location. Blame for this falls almost entirely on the map itself because the quality really was quite poor. I had a few moments of head scratching due to the map quality. Most notably I was quite confused when I arrived at what I was expecting to be a pond at the edge of a field which turned out to be some low brambles that were overprinted on the mapped field as light green to make a perfect shade of bule. To mislead me even more was the fact that there was a stream that ran right next to the field and on the map it looked as if it flowed out of the pond so it really threw me when there wasn't anything there. Despite all the map's deficiencies and the cold weather I really enjoyed myself and it was good to see everyone up in DVOA land this weekend (the annual winter meeting was also last night).
