Orienteering race (Oceania) 1:22:52 [5] *** 8.46 km (9:48 / km) +200m 8:46 / km
spiked:6/19c shoes: Inov-8 X-Talon 212 #3
Oceania Long at Rototoa, Woodhill.
Well this not a good one.
Start was a bit shaky and though I tried to take safer routes to try to minimise time loss. Lost contact on #3 and quickly decided to relocate off the track which cost me time but I think that this decision was good though because I didn't lose too much extra time. #5 was the worst control. I lost almost 20 mins from being so stupid. I was going as I had planned to but then I confused myself because I looked at the map looked to far and noticed that the hill slope on the map was going in a different direction to the one I was on, and then I couldn't figure it out because I just kept looking at the same wrong part of the map - what an idiot. So I relocated off #4 about 4 times before I stood still, refocused, and went off slowly in another direction, with a different plan, and something finally clicked and it made sense and I was able to get myself out of that little rut. Shocking leg! So gutted my gps trace is lost because seeing it would have been really helpful to look back on how/why I stuffed up this leg.
Mucked up #9 because the scale confused me and I was in a parallel bit of detail not far over enough. Didn't go far enough on #13 and #18 and was looking too short.
A lot of the other controls were messy in the circle - another thing which needs a lot of work.
I don't think that I was in "the zone" properly before this race, which I think caused a few of these errors.
A positive from this race though was that I was able to put these mistakes behind me and not let them distract me (too much)so I was still about to have some decent splits in the second part of the course.
Goals for this race were to have a plan for every leg and to know exit direction to have better control flow. This didn't go very well, but on the legs that it did happen it worked. Now just need to make this a lot more consistent!! Also want to run on 1:15000 maps more because they trip me up e v e r y time!
Had a long and really beneficial chat with Krystal afterwards, where we went through and deconstructed this entire run, which was very very helpful (thank you so much!!).