Orienteering race 1:06:22 [3] ***** 3.7 km (17:56 / km) +65m 16:29 / km
shoes: Icebug olx 2nd
NAOC Middle, Course 7b (M55). I kind of figured this wasn't going to go very well. I have trouble with maps in which heavy thresholding was necessary. Not that this was a bad map -- to the contrary, it was clean and sensible, and clearly the right way to map this terrain. My problem is that I can't do the thresholding in the field. I see knolls and rocks that appear visually large, but they're unmapped because they're on elevated bases. And, like #8 on the long course, I fail to see a boulder that appears insignificant among much taller features.
So, lots of trouble finding controls, like #2, #5, #7, #10-11-12. Also problems with cross-country routes when I couldn't properly recognize intermediate features. From 6 to 7, I tried to attack from the rocky spur, but I mistakenly chose the spur just before it, which also had rocks (smaller, and unmapped).
Then the killer, skipping #13 altogether. This is a perceptual issue, just like last week's middle. When I learned that I had mispunched, I looked again at the map and saw #13 for the first time, as though it had been printed in invisible ink that had just materialized on the paper. I had been seeing the line as if it ran directly from 12 to 14.