Orienteering 1:00:00 [4] 7.5 km (8:00 / km)
Nationals Middle, the one national championship that has eluded me thus far.
The rumours were flying around at the arena about how difficult, both physically and technically, this was going to be. Certainly the finish chute suggested it really, really would be. It was twisty uphill sprint with some rocks, logs to jump, and basically a cliff halfway. If the finish is that gnarly, the rest of the course must've been!
I actually found, while running on the warm-up map, that it wasn't so bad, because the mapping was so ludicrously good. Distinguishing between rocks and non-rocks, cliffs and non-cliffs, small marshes, plateaus, it all made sense. It seemed quite easy to completely botch it since it was quite difficult, but I never felt like anything was ambiguous or misleading.
Ultimately, my undoing to Thomas was that I was being too careful. I tried to stay in the moment and not get too ahead of myself, but that required to scale everything back very much, and I also missed key information that would have saved time, especially at 12 when I didn't grasp the sheer size of the hill behind the control, which was so distinct that it should have made finding that particular control a cakewalk. But, I stopped too high and wasted 20 seconds standing still.
I didn't lose that kind of time on many other controls, but there was simply quite a bit of stopping and walking, double-checking, and being sure, possible to an excess. It wasn't feature paranoia, which is good, but I'd still like to be better so I could walk slightly further out on the razor with the confident of not falling off.
Another question, why don't I race like this in Europe? Criminy.