Orienteering race 37:00 [5]
shoes: Poison Ice Bugs
Thomass Eliminator - 3 sprints in Palgrave East and West using Thomass handicaps. Top 16 from 1st sprint compete in 2nd sprint. Top 8 compete in 3rd sprint. All participants can do all 3 sprints but only the top group in each sprint is competing for the win.
Holy CRAP, it is hard to do a 12-minute forest orienteering race - let alone three in a row with only a few minutes off in between. You can't afford to rest physically or mentally, and there's no time to think your decisions through. I suppose this is what orienteering is always like for people who can run quickly. Going at my pace, I usually have time to think.
Loop 1 was in Palgrave East and went fairly smoothly. It was in the area where 'Bent had set up his contours-only training in December, so it was familiar ground. Loop 2 was in Palgrave West behind our place and - ironically - it's where I did the stupidest stuff. I ran past #2 because I was looking in re-entrants, not on spurs. (No time to read control descriptions.) I only had about 20 seconds to review the map before we started and I see now that I made a really silly choice of which two lettered controls to visit. I was lucky to squeak into 8th place, just making it into the 3rd round.
Loop 3 started with a road run to the start flag that looked as long as the rest of my course. Because we had some strong runners in the group, I was certain that I would place 8th in this round, even though Nick gave us 10 seconds of advance start on the road run for each handicap point. Sure enough, I fell from 1st to 8th place long before we finished the road run, but I did pass one guy on the final steep hill before we turned into the conservation area.
Luckily, I could hit my two lettered controls along the same stretch of trail, which made the O course quicker. I met several people at the 2nd last control and had to stop to rescue my new Salomon toque after it was torn off by a branch. So it was a happy surprise to run over the last hill and into the finish valley to find Nick waiting for the first racer to arrive. Yahoo! Leanimal placed 4th, so the local ladies did our part today. 'Bent volunteered at the race with BulletDog instead of further damaging his knee. Big thanks to Nick for putting together a fun event for us, even though he injured his knee recently too. And thanks to Sid for managing the SI - he's become quite a guru over the past couple of years!
(Time is approximate pending results.)