Did not warm up at all; unless you count the String-O.
Knew I made a bad choice when I realized what time it was after chugging a gatorade. Got into a conversation with another Orienteer about GPS's and then I realized that my time was being called.
So Errors prior to the start:
Did not go to the bathroom before run
Did not hydrate properly at a slow but deliberate pace after the middle which led to a sloshing feeling in my gut.
Did not mentally prepare to see a 1:5000 map.
Did not warm up.
Did not stretch well enough.
Sprint Map
Control 1- started and then ran up the hill which was the obvious route since everyone had been crawling up through the woods toward the campground. Flipped the map and spent more time trying to find the start triangle than I should have. Knew that the point was at one of the buildings so I ran to the closest one; and then panicking when the control code was wrong. At this point I was still not mentally where I needed to be; then I saw that my point was northwest of the fire ring and jogged over there still in a daze.
Error: 05
Control 2- Decided that I was in a hurry and needed to push myself. made sense of the trail and was running it till I planned on taking an asmuth off. I did, and I think by the time I hit 5 paces off the bend in the trail I was worried about dodging trees and other clutter than reading my map. Didnt look at it again until I saw a re-entrant which when i looked at my clue I thought it made sense and got suckered down toward the green abyss. Four things went wrong here:
I was worried about fast and not clean
I didnt spend enough time picking my route.
I didnt concentrate well enough on the map
I didnt concentrate well enough on my asmuth/bearing
Error: 1.22ish
Control 3 was refocus time, and I was able to dive into the correct reentrant clean.
Control 4- I started off on an awful bearing out of 3 almost directly north and had to compensate. after the 1st quarter of the leg though I was fine.
Error: .05
Control 6- Not sure why I didnt get closer to the river to read the details, but for some reason i wanted to curve around it and by the time I realized how dumb it was I was already at the top of the stream. hit the dry ditch, slowed down and read a bit and bent back to where I knew I should have headed, read some more, and then could see it (lucky me; could have been alot worse).
Error: 20 sec
Control 9- Took a good route towards the point, got caught up in some vines along the way but was running in the right direction until I hit a trail, and started following until I had to force myself off, crossed the river fine, then hit the three way intersection of the river and slowed way down because I saw a point and it threw me off, realized that my point was in a re-entrant to the SE a bit and I figured it out. Not sure why I let myself hesitate like that.
Error: 15 seconds
10- Just tired; ran toward obvious building then bounced to the correct one.
Go- Tired.
Error: 2.5 seconds
Total error: 2 min 10 sec
I would have been satisfied with it if I didnt goof up #2 so badly, and I think I could have cut 30 seconds if I would have prepped better for the run. I was tired out there. I am no track star and there were people that were just plain faster than I was. I got my heartrate to spike and my mind went bonkers on #2; so my goal to fix this is to ensure a proper warm up for each race, start off at a jog, and to work on my speed. By that I mean work on increasing the speed at which I can tolerate both thinking about what I am doing and reading a map since I hit the "numb" stage right away into my run and didnt get into the right rhythm till point 3.