Training Log Archive: Matej

A comedy of errors on the Barton Forest Middle.

#1: Headed off in the right direction, but angled down the bank too early and too much. Estimated time lost (ETL): 20 seconds
#2: Never saw the control description (forest corner, inside) and ran around the clearing for some time, perplexed. ETL: 15 seconds.
#3: One of my few clean legs of the day.
#4: Angled down the steep bank way too early, then had to climb up to the shallow reentrant with the control. ETL: 40 seconds.
#5: Some hesitation around the control circle. ETL: 10 seconds.
#6: I never saw the "string" of boulders in the terrain, so I continued up the steep reentrant for too long. ETL: 30 seconds.
#7: Blew my compass heading with no clear attackpoint and had to relocate. ETL: 40 seconds.
#8: Attacked from the clearing and hit a maze of scrubby, chest-high bushes. The map definitely seemed iffy around here. ETL: 50 seconds.
#9: Easy control.
#10: Unintentionally hit the trail bend, which I then used as an attackpoint. Only lost a few seconds due to hesitation in the control circle. ETL: 5 seconds.
#11: Had to drop low to skirt the green. It was frustrating, but I lost no time executing my route choice.
#12: Another clean leg.
#13: Took the southern route choice, which didn't really have a clear attackpoint (the northern route choice along the road had the small hill northeast of the control). As a result, I lost ~10 seconds due to hesitation close to the control.
#14: Straightforward.
#15: I missed the control by several meters on my first pass and had to bail out to the road. I had also misread the control description: I was looking for a boulder, and the control was actually in a shallow reentrant. ETL: 4 minutes.
#16: Brutal.
#17: Saw a control in the distance; it turned out to be a Yellow control on the black X. Inexplicably, I then almost missed the GO control, which about summed up the race for me. ETL: 20 seconds.

Altogether, I lost about eight minutes due to small, annoying mistakes close to controls. Lessons learned: never follow a compass blindly, try to have an attackpoint, and use multiple types of features (i.e. not just contours or boulders) to navigate.

Map link

Red - Splits

Event: LAOC Barton Forest Frolic A-meet
 

Long course at Barton Forest. I fumbled two of the three major route choices, which probably cost me several minutes in the end.

From #7 to #8, I was planning to more or less follow the line through the valley and contour into the control. Instead, I misread my compass, got confused in the terraces northeast of #10, and veered southeast. By the time I saw the steep hill just before the road, I was in no-man's-land. I was forced to take a 700 meter rough compass towards a small depression with hardly any attackpoint to speak of. Fortunately, I saw the campground road in time, which helped me regain my bearings near the control. Estimated time lost: ~2 minutes.

From #9 to #10, I never saw the southern route choice option along the road. Instead, I ran straight through the forest, losing about a minute. It didn't help that I misread the thickets around the control, losing another 30 seconds.

Map link

Red - Splits

Warm up.

Classic Wunderlich loop.

Warm up.

Classic Wunderlich loop in a personal record time.

Warm down