Race Evaluation
Anza Borrego Desert O-Fest 2006: Red Day 1
Cristina
| 1. | Saw right away that the road offered a good route, so ran fast to the road and started reading more carefully once there. Ticked off small cliffs as collecting features, but the wash opening was pretty clear anyway. Good start, easy leg. | ||||||
| 2. | Feeling good and fast. Crossed the spur without having a route in mind (nothing obvious with all the cliffs), so moved along the safe (long) route in the wash. Along the way chose to cut over to the parallel wash for only a slight double back to the knoll. Felt confident that I could handle the complexity of the map. | ||||||
| 3. | +03:00 | Maybe a little too confident. I planned on taking the large wash up to the rocky ground and run the flat section over to the dry waterfall, but I passed the entrance without realizing it (too hard to keep track of *everything*) so I just decided to climb up what I thought was the stream with the control in it, but it wasn't. Didn't take too long to realize that I was only in the wrong branch, but then I had to get over there. | |||||
| 4. | +03:30 | I planned to handrail along the edge of the high rocky ground and just drop into the right ditch. Thought I was doing a great job keeping track of features, but apparently not since I dropped in to the wrong one, way too early. It's also oriented ~90 degrees differently from the correct one, which I should have noticed. Traveled most of the way down before I realized what I'd done. Hopped out and dropped into the right one. | |||||
| 5. | +03:00 | Same problem as the last control. Scampered down the ditch to the main stream bed and then up the big rocky ridge. Thought I was keeping good contact, but dropped in one stream early (I was lower than I realized). There was a control there (for the blue course), which didn't help the matter. Took a minute or so just to figure out where I could be. Climbed out, crossed over, and scrambled up to the right feature. I think on this leg I could have stayed higher to have a better view and to have a good feature to attack from. | |||||
| 6. | Ran the ridge, this time not even trying the (probably futile) task of keeping track of the little reentrants, instead relying on cliffs to the left and the change in the orientation of the ridge. This was better. About 150m out from the control, pointed my eyes in the right direction and spotted the bag. Felt good that I knew where it was going to be, but even better than I didn't have to think anymore to get there. :-) | ||||||
| 7. | +00:30 | Now I'm feeling a little better about the course and the terrain, especially after a quick look at the rest of the course, which was obviously on less tricky terrain. Ran the rocky ridge, but misread the direction of "up" initially so I was trying to contour on the right (wrong) side. I dropped into the ridge and reentrant area from the large saddle, continued until I reached the thin rocky fingers, dropped into the main wash, up and over. Hesitated because my plan had been to cross from the saddle, but that's easier said than done. I think around the long way would have been fine. | |||||
| 8. | +08:00 | So now I'm ready to kick it in to high gear for the less technical end of the course, away from the waterfalls and cliffs. Ticked off the reentrants on my way to the large one and hung a left. Didn't recognize the features, so I wandered around a bit trying to find the reentrat that went the farthest back towards the road, which turns out is actually one that's well off the map. Recovered back to the road and tried again, this time I could see the saddle and double hill from a distance and aimed right for it. No problems. | |||||
| 9. | +00:20 | High tailed it to the large stream bed, basically handrailing along the smaller streams. Ended up on the rocks parallel to the feature, but I could see where I was. | |||||
| 10. | Looked ahead this time and succesfully used the really large features. Hit it right on. | ||||||
| 11. | Ran the line here, right on top of the rocky hill. | ||||||
| 12. | Quick glance before hitting 11 had me thinking left of the line, so I did, though I could have gone perfectly straight. | ||||||
| F. | Kicked it in, never know when a few seconds will count. Someone told me after I finished that I had beat Sharon by "seconds" (turned out to be a couple of minutes) which made me glad that I didn't slack off at the end, despite a shoddy run. |
Total Time Lost - 00:18:20