Orienteering race 1:00:00 [5] 8.25 km (7:16 / km)
shoes: Inov-8 X-Talon 190
Huippu-Liiga Loviisa. Or... Lovisa. Or something. This town appears to absolutely insist on not compromising on the Swedish/Finnish thing. Not even regarding a single "i" in their name.
This was an awful expensive race but a quasi-big deal in Finland and was also a world ranking event, so it was worth the money and the driving distance for the fun/adventure! This week has not been great for training, and I have not been sleeping well or feeling all that fit, so that had me worried quite worried.
The day started off raining heavily, so I opted for 3/4 tights and my X-talons, in part because it was raining and partly because the old map had a hill in the middle of it that I thought we would be doing a bit of trail running on. However, about 10 minutes before my start the sun came out and it got super hot and totally tried up. AND, we didn't use that hill at all. So, there I am at the start in the wrong shoes and way, way, over-dressed. Off to a bad start.
I start off quite calmly and comfortably, trying to stay vigilant on where I was turning and where I was going, but it didn't take long for little mistakes to start creeping in as a result of poor mental focus. I think I made the right choice to 3, but I had to pause because the area I wanted to go had a passable fence before the grass, something that I had plenty of time to notice or swing my in magnifier, but I was trying to run.
I think I took a bad route to 4 that tacked on a few meters, and then number 5 I lost time after slipping on the incredibly slick wood boardwalk and crashing.
7 was the first symptom of the troubles I often have in Finnish sprinting (well, Scandinavian in general), when it gets really confusing what is Olive Green and what is not. I opted to take the alleyway to 7, but as I approached my turn, I look in and the area looked extremely out of bounds. Sandy, a decorative wall, all the sort of things that I suppose instinctively I thought had the hallmarks of an out of bounds area, but, in this case, it was and it wasn't. Because the passage was okay, but the grass to the right side of the passage was NOT. So, I went on to the next opening, which of course I then realized was one too far. That route choice also set me up badly for the approach to control. These are things that I should be making myself aware of on my way to 6, since I had plenty of time to think about it. I can tell myself to ABP but for some reason I just don't seem to do it.
As I look at the GPS tracking to get more of an idea of what went wrong, my mistake filled 10-11 control was probably where I lost the most time. Kivikas, who started a minute behind me, was 15 seconds up on me at the start of the leg, and was 47 seconds up on me by the end. That is, no question, disasterous.
We had a map change at 9, so I didn't have a ton of time to plan, but I think I saw the good route pretty quickly, and then executed micro choices poorly. I didn't turn hard left right out of 10, and end up having to go around a big pile of dirt. Then coming up the starts, I immediately turned right when I needed to go down one more road. And instead of going straight down the grass, I ran the winding road. Why the hell would I do that?
I suspect I'm actually reading the terrain more than the map, in the sense that I see the terrain, and make decision without consulting the map. I saw this road that snaked through this little grassy downhill, and in my head I assumed the grass was out of bounds. In a sense I think it comes back to my lack of clarity in what is olive green and what is not, since they often LOOK the same, but are arbitrarily, by the rules, not the same. But, this comes back to needing to trust the map more than my own perceptual instincts. Shortly thereafter I turned into an olive green driveway one turn too early. This was certainly due to a lack of focus and vigilance of planning. I wasn't asking myself the important questions - what should I be looking for? How will I know? etc.
Anyway, now that Kivikas had me in his sights there's no doubt he was ultra motivated to pick up the pace and he eventually reeled me in, particularly when I missed another shortcut on the way to 14, which I suspect was due to my acute mis-trust of being able to recognize what is OOB or not. Once he had punched 15 in front of me, I pretty much stopped reading the map and put my head down to try to hang on, which didn't work so well either. There were no real routechoices so it was not really a matter of that, I just couldn't seem to run very hard either, perhaps due to being WAY too hot now.
In the end Kivikas was 6th and I was 24th. There were so many places within a small amount of seconds I really feel like with better focus I would have been in the 10-15th range, possibly top 10.
I don't think this has anything to do with fitness, or even poor technique, it had everything to do with my mind not doing the things I know it should be doing. It wasn't so much an issue of thinking about irrelevant things, rather, not thinking about anything at all. I can't think of how many times I reminded myself to Always Be Planning, before the race, and then I didn't do it.
Or.... maybe I just hadn't sprinted since the JK. And the JK went really well. So.... I'm not sure.
Also, side story. This was the first time the paper on the back of an EMIT card saved me. The computer said I didn't punch 14 (which I of course did), but fortunately my paper hadn't fallen out and it had the little pin punch. I have now learned my lesson that that stupid paper has the potential to save my ass. Some guys weren't so lucky at the same control because they do that punch where they just tap the unit instead of actually punching, and so didn't have the paper.
MÃ¥rten won and has one of those older EMITs that has the LED screen on it, so he's able to do that super fast EMIT punch technique and check to see if registered or not. From what I understand, those are no longer available. Naturally, I find this to be wildly unfair. But, this is me we're talking about, so is that really a surprise?