| A few months back I may have been quite frustrated with my performance this weekend and while I'm not overly happy with how things went, I'm not terribly upset either. There are a few reasons for this. First, this event tested some skills that I haven't focused on much yet in my orienteering career. The visibility was relatively low. Route choices involved choosing how much to avoid the green. More than a few controls were undersized features on relatively bland hillsides (much as I imagine French Creek) which required precise compass/distance navigation. I have not practiced these kinds of things much. Probably the Barebones is the only thing close. Secondly, I had a decent if imperfect run on Sunday, very near my unstated goal of a 70-point USOF rankings run - a clean run would have gotten me near 80 points. Third, the kinds of mistakes I made indicate definite areas to train (in particular compass and distance work), so I can use the event as a learning experience and springboard. Finally, I have only rarely run Blue courses, and Saturday's appears to be the longest I've ever done, so there's some sense of accomplishment in that.
I think the reason "the boom" on Saturday doesn't bother me more is that it feels like such a freak event (true or not). I was navigating perfectly well, but the combination of getting close to the edge of the map and seeing several houses which felt they were too close (and they were as I had missed further down that I originally realized), the undersized feature, and the over-awareness that you should listen to alarm bells caused me to panic and over-react. The best course of action would have been to calm down and reason the situation out. Instead of asking myself whether I was in the right spot or not (which I did repeatedly), I should have asked myself 1) If I'm not in the right spot, is there any other place I could reasonably be (no) and 2) if I am in the right spot, why is there no flag (inaccurate bearing and distance from the hilltop with the flag below an undersized point feature). There's not too much point in over-analyzing the rest of the course as I completely lost focus after this mistake, on #12 thinking "oh, here we go again" and on #16 thinking that I really didn't want to be orienteering anymore. I even went so far as to pause at #12 before punching for a bit just to try to reset my focus and imagine that the rest of the controls represented a new course (This ultimately didn't work).
I'm not too worried about route choice mistakes at this point of which I made a few. My priority is to run cleanly. I'm also not terribly concerned with my (sometimes quite significant) compass/distance mistakes, as that is something that is fairly easy to work on. Rather, my biggest disappointment from this weekend was that I didn't orienteer systematically in any sense. Even on legs I ran relatively cleanly, I often didn't have much of a plan. Often, I looked at one route, didn't see anything obviously wrong with it, and headed out. I really want to get into the habit of looking for strong attackpoints and safe, fast routes, and spiking controls in the circle (even if it means slowing down a lot). I think I had too much of a sense of urgency this weekend - my attitude being that I didn't have time to navigate more carefully - and that is a dangerous approach.
I think I can do some armchair orienteering (as well as taking maps with me on my training runs) to develop this more systematic approach. I also think it would help at this point to do a little map study immediately before every race as mental preparation.
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