RouteValley Goat Mass Start with Peter and Keegan
These mass starts are so fast especially in a park like Valley Forge
Peter split off with an early skip leaving Keegan and I behind. We kept seeing Peter in the distance motivating us to push to catch up. We kept swapping the lead back and forth while cruising through the open park fields not able to catch Peter for a large part of the course.
Eventually Keegan and I closed the gap while still having one control to skip making Peter's race much harder to win. We continued to the last part of the course where there were two clear options of what to skip.
Keegan and I chose opposite controls to skip, Peter getting both. My entry into the control was really smooth and fast pushing me into a relatively strong lead into the last couple of controls.
I scrambled down onto the road and heard sirens blaring at me from just down the road. An angry park ranger stopped me and asked what I was doing running off trail in the park. I quickly explained that this was my first time in the park and I had no idea you couldn't go off trail and it was just my friends and I were going through a run through the forests.
Unfortunately the ranger was very passionately explaining the history of the park and why we can't run off the trails in the park which meant Keegan, Peter and my dad all caught me making the mess even worse.
Thankfully he was nice about it and let us go expecting us to stay on the trails so we just bailed back to the cars.
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Anyways, now about the actual training. The terrain was very open and fast for the most part. I didn't have a specific focus, it was mainly just good practice with fast orienteering, but what I gathered from the training is watch out for parallel features, make sure you know where you are entering the control, and look ahead for visible features to keep a compass