Orienteering race 1:55:09 [5] **** 7.6 km (15:09 / km) +190m 13:28 / km
spiked:7/10c shoes: Silva Pro Lite
DVOA's French Creek East - so I think running the Stumble yesterday was doable, but pushing it... today, however, was not a good idea. Again, the climb killed me today, and I tired out pretty quickly so I walked a lot of the course. I also had several controls that were quite a disaster with at least 15min of error for the course. Right off the bat I completely blew by my number one. I was high, but hit another control that I thought was only about 100m away, but I wound up hitting a trail that was probably 300-400m from my control. Luckily I relocated almost instantly and found the control from there without any trouble, but it still cost me 6-7 min. My second control was even worse, it was hung on a depression amidst some rocky ground and next to a charcoal terrace. The only safe way to navigate the leg was to jump from either charcoal terraces or boulders along the hillside which I did fine, but of course I ran off my bearing from my attack point and then stopped short and had literally no idea how I was going to relocate, there was nothing out in the forest at that point. After a few minutes running around randomly, I finally made the decision to keep going on my bearing and scanning the terrain for anything that looked like a terrace and if I missed it then I'd just have to relocate from a trail that wasn't terribly close, but was the only sure place to relocate from. Luckily, I hit a terrace pretty quickly and figured I was probably on the one that higher up the hillside amd not far past mine and I turned out to be right. Again though, damage already done. I didn't have too much trouble navigating after that and spiked most of them, but again, I was reallllly slow. I hit some spots of pretty bad vegitation that was much worse than mapped, that slowed me, also many spots where I tried to contour were too steep to really run much. At any rate, any time I ran it wasn't usally for a very sustained period of time until the end of the course. Starting with #7 the woods began to open up a bit and we were generally moving in a downward direction so I was able to run more, I actually picked up enough speed that I blew right past #9, I hit a trail right after I passed it and relocated quickly and found it fine so it was a minor error in comparison to #'s 1 &2.
Still quite disappointed with how today went. This weekend wasn't that great for me in general orienteering wise :( I guess I should keep taking it easy, although I had hoped to pick it back up again this week...