Orienteering race 2:14:00 [2] *** 9.5 km (14:06 / km)
ahr:136 max:159 rhr:59 shoes: Falcon
QOC meet at Fountainhead East, Green course. It was a hot day, even for the locals (how much moreso for the unacclimated). While changing shoes afterward, the pavement was uncomfortably hot on my bare feet. Yow. That's a phenomenon I haven't experienced in many years.
The O was OK. Map was a bit confusing in places. The most pitifully small rocks are mapped (some under 0.5m), but one abutting pair of rocks/cliffs that I navigated past on a late leg (#157 to #127 in the northeast corner), I tried but could not find on the map. We'll see what happens when I put the Garmin track onto the map.
Lots of tricky little reentrants branching, requiring careful alignment so as not to make a parallel error and blissfully gallumphing up the wrong reentrant.
Couple of bizarre control placements. Green #1, which I had no problems with, was an X (human-made feature), a rusted something-or-other. Easy to see the feature, easy to see the O-flag, and the SI box was nearby. (But some people thought there was no SI box there. (Valerie reinstated them.))
Another, a 0.5m knoll (Yes, it was prominent when you were at it.) that was also a water stop. It was obvious to see the O-flag, the knoll, and the jugs and cups. It was not at all obvious where the SI box was. Spent a good 30 seconds looking around for it. It was zip tied to a spindly little sapling sticking right out of the knoll.
Gorgeous woods, even if I ran through some spider webs that made me wonder if any of Shelob's relatives live nearby. The mountain biking network looks from the web sites I perused to be quite challenging, but more along the lines of "How much trail mileage can we sculpt into the limited area? (a la Dryer Road in NY) than a large park criss-crossed by trails.