Orienteering 2:40:00 [3] 20.5 km (7:48 / km)
Hervoton!
What is a Hervoton? No idea. But this day it was a really sweet ultra-long distance race down in Jamsa. It was measured at 18.15 k, with 42 controls. Basically everyone from Tera was planning on using it as a nice comfortable training, which was my plan too. Don't kill myself too much, but work on good habits and mental focus (the mental focus only appeared about 3/4 of the way through).
We ran one side of a map to control 18, and then did a 1:2500 box, followed by 32-42. Amazingly, it was all at 1:10000 too. I would have really liked it at 1:15, but this was nice too. Plenty of variety, some flat areas, some rocky areas, some hillsides. I made a dumb mistake at 5 and lost the train of Teemu, Toni, and Jani (well, I was really more like the wobbly caboose), but that was really okay because then I did a ton of independent navigation. In general the solution was "go straight", with a few exceptions. I made a dumb mistake at 13 when my mind started to wander, and I have difficultly distinguishing when its "grey rock" or "white forest" or "open", sometimes these tend to blur into similar looking areas.
Aside from that, I just happily mosey-d on my way, generally being very clean and just not moving very fast. On a few legs I had absolutely no idea where I was, but trusted my direction and I picked up things along the way. I'm really not comfortable doing that, but I just need to remember to have a final destination, and not worry too much about the stuff in the middle. (Remember? Release myself from the icy grip of "feature paranoia").
I'm really, really bummed, though, that my GPS crapped out 2/3 of the course. I think I can no longer take laps at controls, because eventually that'll cause the watch to think the battery is dead and sometimes eat my workout. I'm close to just trying to get a new GPS. The 620 is nice but apparently has terrible accuracy, or I could try the new Suunto Ambit 3 coming out right away here, but my last Suunto, the T6 was a total dud.
So, I had to guesstimate the distance since my watch stopped tracking at the end of the box at 14.4k, but with the course being 18.15 and generally going straight, I'm guesstimating about 20.5. Nice!
Interesting side note, Strava and Garmin Connect actually disagree about how far I went. Garmin says 14.33, Strava says 14.44. This isn't the first time they've put different informationm (the elevation is always wildly different), especially when my watch eats the workout. How does that happen?