Orienteering race 29:43 [5] *** 3.5 km (8:29 / km)
19c shoes: Silva Pro Lite
Flying Pig, Relay - since I was running the orange leg, I was the one running the mass start which I was a little bit nervous for - but overall found really exciting. All the excitement went a little to my head though and I made a pretty dumb error on my way to the first control. I actually ran to the wrong control first, which was thankfully not really out of my way, but still I knew better. The plus side is that running to that control (it was the yellow leg's #1) pulled me down to a trail which I ran and avoided a lot of the deadfall that all the other orange runners had to run through on the way to our first control. So even with my mistake I still arrived at the control just after Ted Good, the first runner get to #1. From there the orange course was forked so Ted and I took off in slightly different directions, but we met up again a few legs later. I kept him in my sight for another couple legs and was gaining on him - and then I made a another boo-boo. We were running down a trail that ran through a field and then entered the woods, and then forked and from the fork our control was only about 30m into the woods from the fork. So, I wasn't looking at my map terribly hard since I already had my compass set to take the bearing once I hit the fork and I knew I'd hit it head on since it wasn't far off the trail, etc. And so when I hit the fork, I took off into the woods on my bearing and EVEN came to the right feature (a pretty deep depressing/sinkhole/pit thing) just when I expected to, but there was no control there. I just stopped and blinked because I just didn't see how it couldn't be there...till I took a harder look at my map and realized that another trail junction with a much smaller trail (hence why I didn't see it initially) preceeded the junction I wanted. It also just so happened that there was a depression in pretty much the exact same location from the junction that I took as the one I was supposed to take. Thankfully I only lost about a min there, but it still really threw me for a second. The rest of the couse went reasonably well, I took a nasty fall and slid downhill for a few feet face first on my stomach (I've got some nice scrapes all over my abdomen from it), but I recovered from that very quickly. Again, the climb was killer especially toward the end of the course and I had to walk some of it. Its just kind of a bummer that I had that error, cause I was kind of looking forward to a race to the finish with Ted, but he came in about a min ahead of me (which was of course the min I lost) so I had to bust my ass up that hill to hand off to Sandy on my own!
Yay for being the 8pt team Relay Champs! Congrats to all the other winning teams!