So I ran my first WOC race today. Unfortunately, while the course was very hard, as I was hoping it would be so I could have a chance to out-navigate some people, my navigation was pretty sloppy. I couldn't place in most US A-meets with a run like I had today. Many of the controls required map reading skills that I'm weak at: precise vegetation reading, plus marshes, minor streams and rides, so any chance to out-navigate folks got beaten by that..
Here's
the map.
For me, there were 6 really hard controls (usually a vegetation feature inside medium green) and another 4 or so which I'd call hard. Controls where generally well 'tucked' into the feature. If you were spot on the feature, and correct side/edge-of, the control was visible, but if you were just running near the center of the circle looking for orange, you were often out of luck, even from 10-20 meters away.
Of the 18 controls, I spiked about 10 of them, but lost up to 2 minutes on the other 8, for about 8 minutes of total time lost. As a measure of how hard this course was, even the winner of this Qualification heat had almost 3 minutes of mistakes, and I'd guess most of the top 15 (qualifiers) had 4-6 minutes of mistakes. I'd chalk up my difference vs. the best as:
(a) slow in general (e.g. on a track 10k) 30%,
(b) esp. slow in the rain 5-10%,
(c) esp. slow in green 5-10%,
(d) slower navigational skills esp. vegetation, marshes, tiny streams & rides 5%
(e) mistakes: 20% ( 8 - 3 = 5 minutes more than the winner)
for a whopping total of
60% behind the winner.
Qualifying was
15% behind the winner (and is sometimes closer to 10%.) So to qualify, you've got to have your sum of (a)-(e) in the 15% range, something I'm quite far from.
There are days where my (e) is close to 0% (e.g. one race at World Cup Latvia.)
(b), (c) & (d) would need substantial practice to improve to broader my terrain skills for a day like today. Depending on weather and terrain, however, those can also sometimes go close to 0%.
(a) is a big problem. What I don't know is how low this can go - e.g. am I already close to my 'genetic limit', or perhaps I don't train enough, specifically-enough, and/or with good coaching/team-mate/motivation whatever. What I do know is I only have a few more years to push this down. Can I get it to the 10-15% range, which would make it possible (although still quite hard) to make a WOC final? I'm not sure when I?ll have that answered, or even planned one way or another. Not in this post?.
Looking at the US Men,s WOC team overall, I managed to be 4 people in my heat. Clem beat 5, and Eddie 6, with a much better time of 35 vs. my 44, and the one US man to 'beat Canada' today. Eddie has had several very solid races in tricky terrain in the past few years, this WOC Qualifier and the Team Trials Middle included - he thinks the difference may just be concentrating more. It seems to work.
Physically, the good news is my hips were back to normal, just in time. My L-hip didn't hurt me at all today, not on the warmup, during the race, or afterwards (my R-IT-at-the-knee started hurting again in the evening - another sign that alignment is back to normal.) That's very good news for the general fun of enjoying orienteering, and being able to train for it. Being able to run healthy is a far more important goal to me than how I do at WOC. Perhaps it's a pre-requisite, and thus not a fair comparison, but generally, I suffer far more greatly when I'm injured and unable to compete, than I do by competing slowly instead of quickly. Running in the middle of the pack on the 1st leg of the US relay champs (slowly, just off a knee injury) was pretty fun.
Put a little differently, if I could flip a coin where heads would instantly enhance my fitness to let me run a 29 minute 10k for the next 5 years, and tails would result in me being too injured to run at all for the next 5 years, I wouldn't flip the coin. Even if it were biased 80/20 toward the positive outcome.
? as I?ve diverged into philosophical probabilities, I think I should end this post? Good night readers?