Orienteering race 2:02:12 [4] *** 13.0 km (9:24 / km)
23c shoes: Icebug olx 2nd
The Goat at the QOC Patuxent meet. This course was my suggestion, indirectly. I thought a long intermediate course would be a good idea for this National Orienteering Week meet, thinking it would be something for the AR crowd to sink their teeth into. In Nadim's hands it turned into a Goat, with a fork and a skip, and it turned out to be pretty good. The navigation was plenty hard enough, no controls on point features, but the reentrant systems in this park often have a lot of detail that makes them tricky. The forest seems a lot whiter than mapped, and offered really fine running except for a few areas of downfall. The course, or at least my route, avoided most of the mountain laurel, but I hear it was rough on Brown.
I ran with Dave O. and Victor Lin for the first few controls. Dave took a wrong turn before #5, and I shouted something to him but he didn't hear. Didn't see him again. I caught up with Victor after a couple more controls, but then he took an early skip at #10 and he stayed ahead of me after that.
I skipped 18, which looked good geometrically, but with no good route from 17 to 19 it didn't turn out that great. I maybe saved 2 minutes over the full 17-18-19 combo. Interestingly, when I was backtracking towards 16 on the Blue Trail I passed a long line of runners on the 16-17 leg, not just on the goat, but other courses too. Popular route choice.
Only one mistake, leaving 15 I got on the wrong trail and paralleled the field for way too long before realizing the mistake, backtracking, and taking the Blue Trail towards 16. A couple minutes lost. Happy with this run, pretty competent navigation overall.
Orienteering 40:00 [3] 2.5 km (16:00 / km)
shoes: Icebug olx 2nd
Picking up controls. Walking the whole time.