Orienteering race 54:45 [4] *** 6.8 km (8:03 / km)
spiked:23/27c rhr:41 slept:7.0 weight:158lbs
ROC Meet at Oatka Creek Park. Western Mass Rules (I've always been partial to Eastern Mass), which meant there were 27 controls on the map and Red was get 'em all, Green was "get 20", Orange was "get 15" and Yellow was "get 8". I ran Red and started out by overrunning the first control by enough that it became the second control - it turns out that something was up with this map and stone walls were not much distinguishable from trails. Since Rob had already done the Sprint, I did not want to lose to him on Red, so giving up time right away was bad news. Little did I know, there was no need to worry, as he did a shorter course.
The early trail run gave me a chance to come up with a reasonable plan, and I executed fairly well, with just a few small mistakes here and there.
Route: 26(oops)-14-11-9-27-12-17-15-23(oops)-25-10-22-24-21-5-6-13-7-4-20-19- 16-3-18-2-1-8
I meant to go to 25 before 23, but I was a bit left and saw 23, so I had to grab it. The greens near 16 were not as dark as mapped (at this time of year, so I tried a short-cut to 3, which didn't pan out as things did get gnarlier, but I didn't lose much time to the trail route. I also blew 1 slightly, again mistaking a stone fence for a trail.
I saw Patty out on the course a couple of times and she was going almost as fast as me, but I managed to finish 23 minutes ahead. Without any of the regular competitive folks on Red, my rare victory was by about 20 minutes.
Next week - time to be humbled again by West Point.
Orienteering race 20:45 [4] *** 2.6 km (7:59 / km)
spiked:10/12c
Sprint Course at Oatka Creek Park. Too many doglegs to be a real fun sprint. C2 was about 100m out & back. C4 required me to run a trail past C6, then C5, I had to use the same trail back to C5, then to C8 (I think, my map must have blown away).
I was about a minute behind Rob and Sergey, and I lost at least that much on C8, when I lost track of where I was because I couldn't see the main trail from the map in the field.
Running 6:00 [2] 0.71 mi (8:30 / mi)
Brief w/up, then didn't get around to a w/dn, since there were too many runners there to talk to (Jim O, Erik, Vinny and DV all showed up), in addition to all of the regulars.