Orienteering 1:53:00 [3] *** 7.7 km (14:41 / km) +310m 12:13 / km
spiked:11/13c shoes: New Balance Orienteering
Red Day 1 at the Boulder Dash. This course was pretty easy and incredibly wet but fun. A lot of the best route choices involved taking trails/linear features a good chunk of the way. On the other hand, my goal for this weekend was to be clean, so this course definitely helped with that :-). The biggest problem for me with this course was just not being able to run fast enough. There were times when I was on trails when I felt like I should have been able to run faster, and I ended up walking some of the uphills. (Especially the long ones on the way to 8 and 9.)
Control 1 was fine.
Turns out the clear cut area on the way to 2, which looked pretty bad on the map probably would have been ok to run through, so I could have cut instead of taking the trail, but this did give me a nice solid attackpoint.
Control 3 was one of the more difficult ones, but we were attacking from a reasonably easy direction, so it was fine.
Control 4, I decided not to climb up 3 or 4 contour lines to take the trail just to come back down them again. I'm not 100% sure this was the best choice, but it did keep me off trails for this leg...
Control 5 was another trail run with a short jog into the woods at the end. Control 6 was the road crossing, so although not trail heavy, still pretty easy.
Control 7 was completely a trail run. I guess just to get us away from the road.
Control 8 was the first big climb up a huge hill. I definitely slowed down for the climb, but didn't have any problem finding the control.
Control 9 could have been difficult but there was a nice catching feature immediately behind the control (trail with a huge bend about 10m away), so I just compass beared up the hill to the control, ended up hitting the trail bend and came back to the control.
Control 10 was the first control I was worried about. I decided to be safe and come down to take the trail because I couldn't see a good attackpoint otherwise. The control wasn't all that far into the woods off the trail anyway.
Control 11 was another potentially difficult control. I followed the reentrant to a hill and then compass beared to the control.
Control 12 had a rock wall that ended nearby, so I came up above the control and looked for the end of the rock wall to head in to the control, which worked well.
Control 13 was a trail run in with Cristina right behind me. I managed to keep in front of her the whole way and into the finish.
A pretty clean run in the rain. I was definitely pleased with my navigation. I could use some work on speed, but maybe I wouldn't have been as clean then.