COC Sprint - Perth, Ottawa
Dropped off Barney with Valerie, made the flight to Syracuse, rented a car, drove north. Everything was going according to plan until we hit the Canadian border at thousand islands. Apparently, we were not the only ones interested in escaping to the north that day. We were in line at the border for about an hour, which meant that by the time we got to Perth, I needed to immediately change and run to the start.
I was apprehensive about running the sprint because at the last one I ran, in Idaho, I felt dead slow and just plodded along. Of course, that was on zero training, and this was with at least some training going in. I felt ok from the start and was excited to see the course when I turned over the map.
The race went mostly ok. I think I chose the wrong routes on 10, 14, 19, and definitely 20, where I did not go through the water, losing about 20 seconds. I also had small time losses (3-8 seconds each) on 8, 11, and 14. On 14 I was running across the main street, expecting the crossing guards to stop traffic in both directions. As I was the first person crossing there, one of the crossing guards forgot to put up his stop sign, and a car had to slam on its breaks hard to avoid me at the last minute. I think they figured it out after that. :)
My speed wasn't terrible given the amount of running training I had done (none), so I was mostly satisfied. Certainly, losing about 1 minute total during the race is a lot for a sprint, but that's what I get for very rarely racing sprints these days. Damian's time of 14:41 was certainly impressive. I did win M35, but was 17th overall on the course, which included M20, M21, and M45. (Of other old guys, I was beaten by the eternally young Brian May, Jon T, and Wyatt).
RG:
http://orienteering.ca/cgi-bin/reitti.pl?act=map&i...