Orienteering 1:32:00 [3] 9.83 km (9:22 / km) +184m 8:34 / km
12c shoes: 201206 Inov-8 X-talon 212
JJ's Wicked Hard Night-O from the UNO Camping Weekend. The course was novel, though on the easier of the difficulty distribution of historical WHNOs. The controls were geographically grouped into sets of three - controls 1, 2, and 3 were proximal; 4, 5, and 6 were a triplet, etc. The triplets had to be taken in order, but the controls within a triple could be taken in any order. My headlamp, which I have not used in months, turned out to be destroyed - at least one of the batteries had ruptured in the case, and there was damage to the lamp housing. I ran instead with my bright Fenix TK35 held in my hand. It had rained intermittently through the evening, but I think it was dry when we started.
The first leg was a km+ trail leg, and I moved into the lead with Giacomo and Ethan nearby. Neil got creative and tried to cut the leg, but we headed him off. Ethan decided to run 2-1-3; Giacomo, Neil and I ran 1-3-2. I had a weak attack to 1 and punched behind Giacomo, but I had the lead when we left 2 on the long leg to 4. Giacomo and I were together, and Ben had attached himself to us. We missed the spit of land across the lakes and had to hack through some reeds; we ran into Giovanni here, who seemed to be going in the wrong direction.
By the time we reached 4, the rain had become torrential, and visibility was reduced. We saw Giovanni again when we missed our marsh handrail poorly. Our trio punched 4 and ran into a confused Neil about 50m past 4; he ran back to get 4 and caught up to us by 5, where we found Giovanni. The five of us took slightly deviating routes to 6 but converged there. We lost Giovanni, who decided he was happy with his outing and made the 2 km+ run back to the start. Our merry quartet ran the 2.3 km leg to 7 without incident, though we did break up into two groups and reconverge well before the control. Controls 9 and 8 were uneventful; at 8, Giacomo decided to go "Hunger Games" on us and broke away from the pack. Ben and I followed Neil out of 8, and I decided to adjust my plan after some consideration. Neil had gone out of sight when our routes diverged; I probably should have stuck to my plan, but I instead bailed to the road. Through a swamp. Yay dumbness.
Anyway, Ben and I marched along and executed the rest of the controls fine, but finished about five minutes behind Giacomo. At the start of the race, I had planned to try to break away from the pack and run the race solo. I'm still somewhat inexperienced at Night-O, and having company through the deluge in Pawtuckaway in the dark was pleasant. Ben showed great toughness plowing through the night, and only majorly lost contact once. GPS track again shamelessly stolen from bgallup.