US Champs Middle Distance, St. Patrick's/Madeline Bertrand County Parks, MI/IN, 4.6 km, 45m, 23/35. Temps in the 50s and light rain most of the time. This was a particular kind of orienteering, and for that kind of orienteering, I thought it was done quite well for the most part. Mostly flat, a lot of trails and open areas -- some people thought it wasn't worthy of a championship event, but I didn't really have a problem with it. It was for sure a place where there were a lot of opportunites to make good time if you could cover a lot of ground fast, and at my current level of fitness, that's not something I'm real good at.
SA has me with 3:27 in errors, whcih is interesting. A little bit on #3, sure, I got into the circle and had to stop and scrutinize the contours to figure out where the spur was. Then #7, a route choice leg where one option was to go through the green, and that's what I did. It started out with medium green, which wasn't bad at all, definitely worth doing. But then before popping out into the open, there was a strip of light green, and that turned out to be bulletproof. Finding a way through pushed me well off to the right, and I had to cover that extra distance to get to the control. 9 was in a "clearing" in an area that was a patchwork of vegetation colors. I got caught up in some green leaving #8, then when I got to #9, I attacked in a way that took me through "white", but it was all just a bunch of crud. I checked one wrong "clearing" before going to the right one.
But intriguingly, I don't show a time loss on #12, which suggests that it wasn't a very good leg. First, I misread the map, thinking I'd go to a paved road that turned out to be an uncrossable river. Running along the bank of that, I next needed to cross a "ditch". At the spot where I crossed it, it was two steps in ankle-deep water with an adequately firm bottom. Others crossed it in different spots and ended up waist-deep in black printer's ink. Once across that, we hit a real paved road which had an uncrossable fence on the far side, and most people had failed to notice that on the map (yes, it was mentioned in the meet notes, and yes, we had driven along that road on the way in, but still). I could have climbed the fence, but it would have been ugly, so like most people, I went around. Once around, I opted to not take a diagonal route, but instead to go back to where I would have crossed the fence, which saved me from another ditch crossing. The result was a respectable time for the leg, meaning that most people must have gotten similarly busted, or worse.
The rest went fine, despite a mistake on #15, where I ran down the wrong side of a gully, having not read the map closely enough, and had to waste time at the end of the leg.
Not that great a showing, although I do have to remind myself that I'm "running up" on Red -- I am kind of an old man at this point. 4th place in M35.
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