Discussion: ??

The suspense is killing me :-)

I'd say it's pretty impressive.
But I want to hear about the omens.

Had a couple of points where I should have had a reality check and just gone home. And that was before I started. And one more just after I started. But nope.

Overall a pretty unsatisfying outing.

I look forward to hearing the whole story. I wondered when you said you were thinking of "doing part of the BG" whether that would be possible. To do only "part", that is.

First person to do it twice.

And among the oldest to ever do a Billygoat course. Only Andy ever managed it under the time limit at a greater age, and Andy and Walt Lyons each did it once overtime when they were 77+.

Excellent perseverance. However, it seems you do your best when you pay careful attention to the omens. Omens, of course, are tricky things. You have to recognize that they are important, and then figure out what they mean and what you need to do to take full advantage.

What kind of omen would it be if Phil were to go out there and put up, say, a 3:25? Hard to say.

No omen, just a reality check.

But geesh I was just hoping to drag my injured body around the course at a modest effort. Now I'm feeling all this pressure ...

Pro tip: approaching control #18 from the west is faster.

sorry it was an unsatisfying day in the woods. only remedy I can think of would be to try again on a different day!

Well, that's about the last thing that's likely to happen. :-)

I think the following reference is before your time in O', but after my first 9th-inning fuck-up, I let out a couple of loud curses, and immediately thought of John Rogers and Linda Taylor, both of whom did the same, though surely even louder and more often, when things did not go as planned in the woods.

Bought a smile to my face as the memory registered.

See, no reason for dispair.

It was just that I'd put almost 3.5 hours of clean orienteering and good effort and proper pacing and still moving not so bad at the end, and then....

Now, if I took your suggestion and did rr#2, hard to believe there wouldn't be all sorts of issues. Because, if nothing else, I'd be even older.

only remedy

Well, you could take some satisfaction in the fact that you willed your 75 year old body up and down the rocky slopes of Mt Tom at (I would say) a pretty impressive pace.

But I can't help but wonder how bad this "fuck-up" at the end was. By your standards at least, I suspect pretty bad. A quick search shows you've only used such language to describe your own orienteering twice since you started logging on AP.

I'll bet it cost him at least a minute and 36 seconds.

17 is its own matter, but I'm curious about the nature of the error at 18. I'll argue that you had not really been to that control before, because it has changed so much in the past four decades. What was your approach to the control?

I think I lost about 3:30 on 17 and a minute in the vicinity of 18.

And I'd been to both points before. :-)

I absolutely had 3.5 hours in mind, thought that was a worthy goal (ie. not easy, but doable). I made it though the climb up to 11 pretty well, but then was fading on the rest of ups. Water sooner would certainly have helped. Drank a bunch halfway to 17 and that must have helped, as I seemed to be moving better.

17 was a morale breaker, missed a little low (probably could have seen it if I'd looked), went lower, had a discouraging trudge back up, figured 3:33 or so would be it at the end. But I felt good heading for 18 (of course, it was downhill), motoring all the way down, got across the marsh well, hmm, how about that, still enough time left.

But then at 18, well, just like at the start, glad no one was watching, just straight out embarrassing. It's the only knoll around, but I looked at it and couldn't decide if it was the right one. Fiddled and diddled, as Johnny Most used to say, finally went for it, slipped on the log and got stuck in the mud (near to knee-deep on me). Extricated myself, got to dry land and the control, took my split. Headed back, slipped on the same log, stuck in the mud again.

Got back to the trail, nope not going to be 3:30, took it easy coming in, a little run, a little walk, why bother.

Still annoyed. But it will pass. What's done is done.

I should thank Phil and JJ for making it happen. An interesting and memorable (not just the bad parts) outing.

Thinking back to 1979, it feels like the woods are nastier now -- much more deadfall especially. I'm pretty sure they aren't any rockier.

I don't think the live vegetation is any better or worse. When they did logging on the hillside in the vicinity of 12 (sometime in the 80s, or 90s?), that seemed to make that area a good bit worse, but this time it didn't seem so bad.

On the other hand, there are some new trails now and they certainly help. So overall maybe things cancel out?

It certainly is a different experience doing a Billygoat alone. My guess is that most won't like it as much. I actually really liked almost all of it, doing it on my own for better or worse. There were several controls where, as I approached, I was thinking, "I sure hope it's here." As opposed to what you want -- "I know it's here."

But the contours are still good, there really isn't any nasty vegetation, and the controls were all in plain sight (thus avoiding all three parts of the NEOC trifecta). It was a pretty ragged bunch of markers -- most were faded, and one was even yellow and white. In addition to the original course did we use the original markers? :-)

I started to do some running late last fall, and kept at it all winter, with the idea that moving both faster and carefully could make orienteering both safe and fun again. That has come true. Now the season and probably the year of O' has disappeared. For those of us who are running out of time, a missed year matters. For 2020, this outing at least puts a lot in the memory bank.

Did you cross to the #18 knoll on the log that was up over the water? The idea was to go on the pile of sticks to the left that Phil, Nancy, and I put in place.

Phil ran out of controls for this course, he had only 16. The one for #18 came from my garage, I think I bought it in the late 1980s and used it for a lampshade for many years. That one, in my opinion, is pretty much white and white. But then Phil realized that he was still short one (he had thought that he had 17). So I looked around and found another control on my "trophy shelf". I don't remember exactly where it came from, but it was completely shredded. It's possible that it was from the 1990 A-meet at Townsend, because I remember Steve Dentino coming back from vetting in the morning and one of the controls had been savaged in the night, but maybe it was from some similar later incident. Completely in tatters, I put it together with the better part of a roll of clear tape, and Phil hung that as #17.

And your split to #18 is currently second only to Neils.

Combination of log and mud both directions. Didn’t see control until I was almost at it.

With John, I figured that (his flavorful language to himself) was his method of an explosive way of exhalation while running--you know, making sure the lungs were fully emptied before each new breath. He never seemed to be affected by it after racing. Maybe he wasn't even aware of it.