Orienteering -race 1:09:25 [4] *** 4.3 km (16:09 / km) +150m 13:45 / km
13c shoes: Innov8 Mudclaw 330 #2
Middle at the pig. Beautiful day. I decided to try and push a bit today and see what going fast is like. A bobble on control 1, but ok, then felt really good by and large through to #6. At that point (perhaps oxygen debt, but perhaps not) i somehow headed 90degrees off (south instead of west, and spent a good long time (4minutes plus) trying to relocate. This rattled me, and i never really recovered - each of the next 5 controls had serious errors, some of which i recovered from after a little confusing, and some (like 11), which took perhaps 10 minutes of head scratching and utter bewilderment - i had no idea where i was! In retrospect many of these came from two proximal issues (both of which were partly related to oxygen debt). 1) poor compass work (sometimes from the slippery map cases, other times from magnifier in odd position). I need to take more time to more carefully orient the map and keep it in position. 2) lack of attention to details on the map near the circle - 11 was two lines below the ridge I was on, but i didn't realize that at all until finally stumbling onto the control.
Though a poor performance, this was a valuable learning experience (especially because I did better than usual in the first two events).