Orienteering warm up/down 20:00 [2] 2.83 km (7:04 / km) +15m 6:53 / km
shoes: O-Icebug Sisu 10.5
Jogging around on rocky trails warmup - a few short segments then about 7-8 minutes in a row, then active stretches (4 types), then jogging about 5 minutes on the way to the start. Well hydrated (lots of stops by the boys' room), with water, ~0.3L each of Coke & Gatorade, plus 1 pre-start Excedrin pre-emptively for the head. Well focused with plenty of time to quadruple check various things like shoe tying, etc...
Orienteering race 1:46:30 [4] 12.0 km (8:53 / km) +500m 7:21 / km
spiked:7/21c shoes: O-Icebug Sisu 10.5
(8/18 update, at Angelica's hotel, which has functional Internet...)
WOC Long qualifier, Men's A. 29th place of ~40, only 15 qualify for finals, so, missed final. Missing the Final was expected.
Navigationally, given my level of understanding of the terrain (well-scattered 15-20 hours of pre-study, plus 2 model days and post-analysis of that), I think I had a moderate run. No major blowouts, but not really clean, with several moderate errors up to 3.5 minutes, slowly stacking up. Felt like I was just leaking time left and right. Only spiked about half the controls. If I chose to spend the time attending the various training camps offered in this terrain over the past year or two, with flights to Europe and weeks away from family & work, I likely could've cut the navigational errors significantly, but that's a very heavy investment to make in one race that I didn't even expect to run until late this year.
Physically I felt like I could run okay, when the terrain allowed. The L-achilles wasn't a noticable problem (moreso the next day on some bad steps in the forest). But when the world elite went by me, it didn't matter if it was uphill, downhill, or flat, most of the men were going faster than me. In particular, a Swede on a downhill, a Finn on a sidehill, and a Norwegian on a King-of-the-mountain leg (one of two on the course) just ran away from me at 20-30% faster.. In some ways I felt like a spectator running along. There were a few other men out there at my pace, and a few others with camelback's I could pass, but I'm clearly a level or two behind the elite tier.
Overall, the terrain was hard enough that with a super-clean run, I could've been surprisingly close to qualifying - on my 'good' splits (7-8 of them), I was 36-42% behind the split-winner. Cutoff was close to 30%+ behind superman (sum-of-splits-winners). But that still means I'm too slow, in this terrain, to qualify.
In a parallel universe, it would interesting for me to try the Euro-orienteering-circuit life. I'm glad Sam, Ross, Cristina, and Sandra are doing this. That may help. And I'm quite happy to see Ali reaching world class even without a full-time Euro-circuit training plan (at least not yet :). Apparently 2000+ controls in 8 months, including a moderate amount of travel-to-train, is working for her.