Orienteering (warm up) 15:00 [3] *** 1.5 km (10:00 / km)
spiked:7/7c shoes: New Balance Orienteering
Model event before the sprint with Presto. Jogged around nice and easy.
Orienteering (ROC Sprint) 24:36 [3] *** 2.6 km (9:28 / km) +60m 8:29 / km
spiked:14/17c shoes: New Balance Orienteering
This course was a ton of fun. I started out 30s after Alex and 30s before Pavlina, which made me a bit nervous. I got to number 1 with no problem. Alex was just leaving as I was arriving, and I could see Pavlina coming up behind me. I ran with the pack to 2, but got a bit confused when we came out at a spot that I wasn't expecting. I stood in confusion as everyone passed me, and I tried to figure out where we were, almost went the wrong way, and then decided that the 4 or 5 other people around me couldn't all be wrong, and chased off after them. I came right up on the control, but now I was at the back of the pack. I decided I better start actually orienteering and worrying less about the pack, so 3-6 went really well, and I started catching back up. I saw Alex at 6, had a brief moment of happiness before realizing that she was quite injured. I had a brief argument about whether she needed help. (She thought no, I wasn't so sure and was eventually convinced that she was ok enough to leave her.) At this point the pack was more or less gone, and since I was still thinking about Alex and not 100% sure that the best decision was to leave her, I decided to take a longer, safer way to 7 at least until my brain kicked back into gear. I found 7-13 without much trouble. Dasha and I were running into each other a bunch throughout. I started to get tired around this point and could feel myself slowing down, but I tried to keep pushing. In retrospect, I may also have been not thinking quite as clearly because I also started making more mistakes. I took apparently not the ideal route to 14, although it seemed good at the time and quite a few other people also thought so, but then made a 5-10s error in the circle. I got to the correct spot at 15, didn't see the control right away, stopped, looked around, took 2 more steps and saw it. I wasn't sure what I was looking for in 16. (It looked like a small circle of white woods, but was in fact a tree. This was a blown up symbol and a bunch of other people were confused, too). However, I found the control without a problem and then basically compass beared to 17 with no problem. All in all, a good race.
Orienteering (ROC Middle) 53:01 [3] *** 4.4 km (12:03 / km) +195m 9:52 / km
spiked:13/17c shoes: New Balance Orienteering
Started out feeling a bit tired going into this, but not too bad. I veered a little to the left on 1 (compass bearing across a reasonably featureless flat area), but found it pretty quickly. Molly Kemp, who started 2 minutes ahead of me, found it at the same time. We ran to 2 basically together. She stepped in the seemly solid pit and sunk to her waist. I was glad to be behind her and didn't step in. We then proceeded to more or less run the next 5 controls together. She lost me on the way to 7 where I made a 15-30s error. I then tried to catch up on 8, which was a mistake because I lost a bit of time here, too. I thought the control was on a depression, but the depression was really hard to see. Luckily I decided to check the code because it was mine. Controls 9-11 were fine. I got on a parallel trail on the way to 12 and lost 5 minutes. I knew I was running too far but somehow didn't notice the other trail I could be on. I kept stopping to look around, but even though the map didn't match up well, I couldn't figure out how I could be wrong. It's kind of ironic because we were talking about listening to your "the map and reality don't match up" bell in the car. Oh well. Controls 13-17 went very well, and I tried to push hard. Except for 12, this was a really good race for me, and I had a lot of fun.