Orienteering race (Tiger Mountain Nav. Race) 3:57:55 [3] *** 13.24 mi (17:58 / mi) +740m 15:19 / mi
19c
Route: 35, 36, 45, 65, 51, 63, 37, 106, 53, 105, 49, 54, 104, 47, 66, 44, 42, 33, 34.
Good times on Tiger Mountain. Lots of really nice, open forest, especially at higher elevation, and also places where you had to go full Lewis & Clark. As with all of these four-hour events, I continued to have issues with pacing, focus, and motivation. For example, at one point I was tooling along on a longish trail leg and started thinking about the Canadian Champs. Soon enough I had forgotten what I was doing, gone right past the control and found myself 200m further on. Silly goose! Luckily, my lack of competitive spirit more than compensated for my lack of focus.
It also seems that I have considerably more trouble navigating on a sparse 1:20000 map at low speed than on an ultra-detailed 1:5000 or 1:10000 at high speed - I'm not certain whether this means I'm a good navigator or a bad navigator. Maybe I'm just an insecure, high-maintenance navigator who needs constant positive reinforcement that he's in the right place.
I should make clear that none of this is meant to sound negative, as I'm perfectly content to use mini-rogaines as enjoyable training, rather than "races," per-se. The message, as always: yay sprints! yay middles!