Orienteering 2:59:47 [3] 7.7 mi (23:21 / mi) +689ft 21:31 / mi
shoes: MPMW15:w
Occoquan
Blue (14 controls, 9.1 km, 210 m)
Actual Distance Traveled: 12.4 km
I seem to have better success at getting good climb data from my own Garmin. I had to borrow a Garmin from the club today and the same thing happened that happened last time I borrowed one, I got a climb reading that was several times what the course was supposed to be. In this case the Garmin told me I climbed more than 900 meters. It's very possible that my actual climb was more than the course climb but there's no way it was that much climb.
For the most part I didn't have too much difficulty. I spent a little more time that I ideally would have liked to spend searching for a few controls.
6/137 - This control was fairly close to 9/142. In turning the map around I got 6 and 9 mixed up as I was headed from 5 to 6. At first I was headed toward 9. It wasn't until I got about 3/4 of the way there that I realized I was heading for the wrong control and adjusted my course. I have to wonder if the course setter did that on purpose.
8/141 - I thought I was in the correct re-entrant when I was actually just to the north of the one that the control was in. It wasn't until it occurred to me that the evergreen tree I was near might be the evergreen tree to the north of the control instead of the one to the southwest of the control that I headed south and found the control fairly rapidly.
11/145 - I was close to this one but to the southwest of it and too low on the hillside. After looking for it unsuccessfully I headed for 4/150 and then north from there. That did the trick. For whatever reason I didn't expect the control to be that high up on the slope.
12/135 - After crossing the stream at the southwest corner of the pond I didn't head far enough west. Instead I turned south and looked there. Once I tried heading west from the corner of the pond I found it.
16/152 - My plan was to find 19/151 and then head northwest. I thought I spotted 19/151 but it was actually 11/145. I didn't verify which control I had just passed. I just kept going. The terrain didn't seem to match the map but I kept going northwest until I saw the fence. At that point I figured out what I had done wrong and turned south and found the control.
19/151 - I went right past this one without seeing it. I couldn't have been more than 20 feet from it when I passed it. It wasn't until I was within sight of 16/152 that I knew exactly where I was and doubled back and found the control I was looking for. It was hidden pretty good but I might have spotted it the first time around if I had been looking to my left as I passed it.
I don't feel as though I lost too much time today. I already mentioned all four controls it took me the most time to locate (11, 12, 16, 19).
The weather was gorgeous, sunny, cool, hardly any wind. I just wore a long and short-sleeved t-shirt on top and felt warm enough.
I tripped and fell a few times. I wasn't running when this happened. I just got my feet tangled in big branches and went sprawling.
This was my first time at Occoquan. It isn't my favorite park. It is a little too small for my tastes but there is lots of good terrain for orienteering in it. The problem with such a small park is that you keep running into people headed this way and that which is very distracting. Given what the size of the park I think the course setter did a great job designing the course.