Training Log Archive: smittyo

An awful day. Yesterday's model was not particularly precise, so based on that and the previous experience this week, I took the approach of not picking Z unless I really felt very solid about the evidence. I also didn't spend a lot of time checking for possible minor Z deviations if I saw a control that looked ok. The result was that I missed a number of the Z problems. Score was 13 out of 20. Five of my mistakes were picking a flag when the answer was Z, the other two were picking Z when I should have picked a flag. I also totally blew the first timed station because I located myself incorrectly on the map and just ended up so confused I was basically picking at random.

The most frustrating part of today was feeling like I really didn't know what I could do differently to solve some of the ones I missed. I plan to have discussions with some of the top people and learn what strategies they used. I will be making a training plan to focus on the skills that I am weak in here. I did some of this last year, but focused mostly on basic TempO skills. I need to get more intense. It's hard to train some of this stuff without more opportunities to practice on courses set by others, but I've got a few ideas of things I could drill that might help.

First Day of PreO at WTOC. Malaga Millegrobbe Map. I felt really good for most of this until control number 9. That was an A flag on a boulder. At first glance it appeared to be a Z. There was another large boulder visible that seemed to be where the control should be. But then I tried to confirm that with sight lines and such and it kept lining up with the flag and not the boulder that I could see. Spent way too much time and ended up applying the Clare rule (when in doubt - pick the control). The correct answer was Z. Shouldn't have gone so crazy on it.

That put me under time pressure for the rest of the course, but I managed to get them correct. I ended up also missing number 8 for similar reasons. The control was slightly downhill on a boulder in line with some cliffs. You could only see the tops of this stuff. The control that looked like the boulder didn't seem to line up with sight lines so I figures it was end of the cliff and picked the flag that was on the sight lines, even though I couldn't really identify a boulder there. Still not sure how the right answer is correct unless the map has some issues.

Ended up with only two wrong and a respectable time at the timed control station. But the course was short so many did this well. Currently 39th out of 64.

Event: WOC 2014 + 5 Days of Italy