Orienteering race (Long) 1:21:47 [4] 7.5 km (10:54 / km) +330m 8:56 / km
ahr:165 max:179 slept:8.0
Earlier start today, much cooler temp but still high 70s i think it was.
Again distracted at the start, which usually I like, but I'm beginning to realize (in hindsight) that I need to focus, concentrate, get my head screwed on straight and have a plan before I flip the map over. How novel, right?! :)
Turned the map and saw a route to 1 by taking roads around, didn't like it. Decided that since I saw a bunch of people running through the parking lot that must be a decent route and thought to try that instead. Dropped down through the woods and came across a paved road. What, where'd this come from?! Dropped through the woods again onto the playing fields and started running towards the parking lot. Looked at the map and saw a trail before the parking lot that I just passed. Ran back to it, decided it didn't look good, so I continued back again on my run to and through the parking lot.
Passed Greg balter who no doubt wondered what the hell i was doing. Got to the end of the parking and saw on the map this little red "X" across the road that I wanted to take, looked at another option, another "X". Determined that there was no way around it (except there was, not a great one, but there was - in hindsight), picked my ego off the ground and ran back through the parking lot, back up to the road and around on the originally discarded route.
What a way to start the day. There are waaay too many reasons I can think of now for why this happened, but basically i just needed to settle myself down, realize that this race is a lot longer course than either of yesterday's and take the few extra seconds to figure it out BEFOREHAND! ugh. I think i lost about 6-7mins on that one alone.
From there it was another flustered mis-calculated route straight up and over the ski hill to 2 (which I didn't think ended up being too too bad, but I guess I lost about 2mins) instead of going around on the road, which of course now seems insanely obvious.
At 2 I caught up with Ethan Childs and we ended up sticking together for the rest of the way, off and on, which was a HUGE asset and i would surely have run much much slower if I didn't have him to push me along, whether it was from in front, behind or alongside to simply to see whose routes were quicker.
The rest of the course was pretty cake, other than overrunning 8 by a few meters and standing around wondering by how far and then getting to the circle of 12 and looking around for 10s before Ethan graciously pointed out that I was standing, on top of tiniest cliff in the area, right above the flag at the bottom of the cliff.
Then at 13, I was fortunate enough that, after my catastrophic disaster on 1, I had flipped my map over to see how awful the rest of the course would be and saw the nearly 2km long leg to 14 so it wasn't a shock when i got to it! After actually studying some route options, Ethan bounded off to the left and I determined likewise that that looked like the least crapiest option, despite some immediate thrashing through green slashy yuck. Still think it was definitely the best route. 14 on was smooth sailing, got away from Ethan on 14 and 15 I think but he made a push and caught me again by 20 or 21.
Overall I feel pretty down about it, perhaps because it was so blatantly obvious the errors on 1 (and so public) and otherwise it simply showed my lack of fitness. I obviously feel weak on the hills, but my orienteering skill is similarly lacking. Doubting my great 'comeback'.