Boyce Park Sprints at Boyce.
http://www.wpoc.org/Results on WPOC page
Forgot GPS watch but just as well... I was a mess physically. Of course that is not unexpected. I haven't run since February and I swelled up a ton 2 weeks ago that I really haven't come that far down from. I am not going to let today effect me too emotionally in the context of dealing with this newfound knowledge that my knee is extremely arthritic.
I wore the brace for both courses. The first course was an open sprint and the second a total forest sprint or maybe just a short forest course. I was as sloppy navigationally as I usually am in the first meet of the year. I had trouble adjusting to the scale of the blown up map on the "c" sprint and overshot the second control so bad I went completely around the hill and back to the first control again. I then took a second crack at it that went a bit better. My other mistake was on the "D" course. I wanted to contour the top of the cliffs to 7 and I somehow drifted much further west then I thought and hit the big junction clearing. I am not sure why it took me as long as it did to sort that out, but it did. Two things to learn. One is that I need to look more at the catching features like that clearing when I am route planning. Second, I need to focus more on the speed of trails in a sprint. I tried to contour too much. Approaching 6 and 7 on "D" were clearly faster to just use the trail instead of contouring above the cliffs.
On to the physical. As I said, I was a mess. It was like I forgot how to run. Glutes were non-existent. I was so slow and basically hobbling, and I was working very hard. I basically was middle of the pack here and this was a sprint. I was middle of the pack physically. It wasn't even a navigation thing (not that there isn't a ton of room to move there), it was speed. My knee was not feeling good, even with the brace my knee was feeling the impact in a negative way. Uphill I even struggled. The good thing is that the swelling the day after was not to the level of the swell-up two weeks ago. My quads were tight as rocks on Monday though. Clearly my legs were not receiving the shock wel at all.