Orienteering 2:24:46 [3] 4.78 mi (30:17 / mi) +1222ft 24:23 / mi
Fountainhead Regional Park
Green (15 controls, 5.9 km, 270 m)
Actual distance traveled: 7.7 km
Actual climb: 372 m
This was my first green course since September. I have been doing brown courses for the most part recently. I did do the Advanced Medium at Great Falls and the Short Stumble at Patuxent, both of which were probably closer in length to a green than a brown.
Fountainhead isn't the easiest park. The terrain gets very repetitive in places. On the whole it didn't give me too much trouble. I wasn't moving very fast. I made a couple errors that cost me time.
I started my trip to 4 by heading towards 13 before realizing that it wasn't 4. It didn't really slow me too much but I might chose a different route if I had noticed my mistake earlier
From 4 to 5 I leapfrogged from 4 to 10 to 7 to 5. That helped a lot but once again I wasn't moving very fast and it wasn't very open for the most part.
7 should have been easier to find since I had been there before but I wasn't right on target. I was south of it when I hit the ridge that it was on.
8 and 9 weren't hard to find. I had a fair amount of company looking for them.
10 should have been easier to find but I turned the wrong way once I got close and wandered off in the wrong direction for a bit.
I wandered too far south when looking for 12 and had to turn north once I got close to it.
I made my biggest mistake when looking for 13. I mistook one turn in the trail for another. I thought the control was due north of me but I was actually further west than I thought I was. I was somewhere between 13 and 4 when I realized my mistake and turned east. I didn't have a hard time finding 13 once I saw what I had done wrong.
On the whole I am pleased with my performance on the green course. I think it was the right course for me considering how long it took me to finish it.
The weather was nice, cool but not too cold. I started wearing a buff on my head and gloves on my hands but I took them both off before long and didn't put them back on. The ground wasn't as muddy as I feared it would be.