You just have to be at peace with being beaten by Oliver Martin or Aoife :-) Works for me. My other tactic is to deny all knowledge of trying to win anything and go the long/senic way on purpose.
Loudly stating this prior to the start is a requirement for this to work!
... or make it simple and just run as Aoife :)
This is even worse than scatter more like a rogaine - the controls are worth different points so you need to work out which particular ones are worth getting/sacrificing. Summer Series events on Wednesdays are the same and I'm not improving at them either.