Orienteering 1:58:54 [3] *** 9.0 mi (13:13 / mi) +1000m 9:49 / mi
11c shoes: Sacony Xodus
Nav-X 2h Score-O with Presto at Harvey Bear Ranch! Amazingly enough (considering it was an orienteering event in the Bay Area), this was probably the most hardcore weather I've ever orienteered in. Presto was displeased :-).
We got our maps ahead of time for this race, so, with the help of Sam, who decided to just go for a trail run to avoid poison oak, I came up with what I thought was an ambitious route through a bunch of high-value controls with a few cut-off points. It started drizzling just before the 2h start, but meh, what's a bit of water...
Presto and I headed off towards the south-west end of the map to try to get most of those controls and after a few minutes I started thinking the rain was getting kind of painful. Then I noticed it was bouncing. Hmm...not rain...hail... The hail wasn't too big (maybe 2mm in diameter) and wasn't too numerous, so Presto and I could pretty much ignore it and we continued on. There were two other runners around my speed that were going to a similar set of controls, so we just concentrated on taking more efficient routes and hitting the controls cleanly.
I took a gu and had some water about 35 minutes in because I wasn't expecting to hit another water control until the very end of the course, and I'm sure the sugar did me some good. The sun came out as we started the big climb up Mummy Mountain to get some 70 and 80 point controls. We ran along the side of Mummy Mountain and saw our 90 point control about 500m below us (woohoo Bay Area...), so we trundled on down.
I'd marked this as a decision point, but we were doing really well on time, so we headed off for our next loop of high-value controls. We got the next couple of controls, and I noticed another wave of storm coming towards us. I thought it was more rain, but as it hit, it became clear it was not more rain. And it was also not nice, light hail. It was big, heavy, windy, intense hail with a tiny bit of snow mixed in. There was enough hail to start accumulating pretty quickly, and I considered just calling it a day and heading in, but we were going to have to cross over a ginormous hill to get to the finish regardless and I figured we might as well get some controls as long as we were going to do that.
The map was 17''x22'', which initially seemed insanely large, but was actually really good for hiding under while running along, which sadly meant that I took a suboptimal route choice into one of the controls, since I was not using my map as, you know, a map, but we found it, and then headed on up the hill towards the finish. I slipped on some icy mud, which unfortunately stopped my watch briefly, so I wasn't really sure how much time I had left. We got a few more controls on the way to the finish and then started running in as fast as my numb feet could take us. We won the women's category and got some yummy chocolate. And I've got some nice, hardcore, hail bruises. Super fun!