Orienteering 1:10:00 [4]
14c
Black Diamond TT Red - Long
1st for the team-trials, but 2nd overall to Magnus J. by 34s and a few minutes in front of Sergey G. today. So good. All my AP-quantified error on the silliest of mistakes, running too high on the shortest leg out there. Bah. Still some rust to shake off of the o-skills!
In general, it was a runner's course and I ran well. We didn't have as dramatic route choices as the men (they had 3 quite big puzzles!) and my solutions were fine, but it's possible going around on the bigger trails would have been faster for some.
I need to start really analyzing what I'm doing out there to improve, so here goes!
1 - Easy, contoured from around the trail junction. But realized my e-punch was in my ski-o hand (right), not my foot-o hand (left), so lost a few seconds to switching that up, jeez!
2 - A longish leg, with a small choice of which way to tumble down the hill. I took the one with a few less contours climb, but not as good of a diagnol. There was a great trail in my reentrant though, which helpfully sped up the route choice. Into the circle fine, could see the control from lower.
3 - Looked to climb on the other side of the valley after the reentrant heading to NNE, diagnoled right to it.
4 - Fought and probably lost time to the rough open. But actually, I think more of a time sink may have not been staying on the trail long enough. I cut, but then had an extra reentrant to go through and ended up too high above the control, staying low at least you don't climb extra!
5 - Uphill slog on trails into the big saddle and then pick your poison to approach the control. I went directly and it looks time-wise like that was good.
6 - Straight. Used boulders along trail to guide in.
7 - Straight. Could see control from lower.
8 - Straight. Hesitated one cliff too early from the little goat-path on the E side of the river.
9 - Long leg. I wasn't truly decisive to start, but went with a route that went down the same reentrant as I took to 2, now that I knew there was a nice path in it. I did have one problem with executing my plan, taking the lower big trail E instead of the upper one, which is what I meant to do.
10 - Eep! My mistake. I was even pace counting! And reports say you could practically see the cliff from 9. So major fail. I didn't really read that it was two contours down, so on approximately the right bearing, I passed right by it.
11 - Long leg, with some small route choice at the beginning and end. I stayed low, passed the unmarked seasonal pond and then went up the second reentrant on the left to make a nice diagnol. Towards the end, I contoured instead of climbing extra on the trail.
12 - To 11 I saw the German girl I'd also seen at #8 and was worried that she was destroying me, because she had started after I had. Eep! But ok, stay calm, the best thing is just to try to get as much time back as possible! So reeled her in on the way to 12, bending left around the hill.
13 - Tumble down, racing Teresa, and then that kicked me into caring enough to run fully up the hill to tumble down to 13.
14 - People are cheering, eep! What am I doing? Ok, bend around and stop. Where is my cliff? I want to find it and finish. Ok, another map look shows it's very close to the trail, so went on, found it and went on to finish.