Orienteering race 1:07:23 [4] **** 7.1 km (9:29 / km)
spiked:12/14c shoes: VJ Falcons #1
NA "Long" Champs, Rocky Ridge (ON), Geezer division (M45-54) again. Mostly a clean, fast run, with one small error in a complex area, and on 4-minute bobble looking for a control in a pit on the edge of green, in a tight orbit around it without seeing it. Managed to luck into probably the sweetest route on the long leg, not that you could discern that from the map, and really pushed hard for the last section. Managed 3rd place, only 49 seconds behind Stanislav in 2nd. Even without the mistakes, James Tasker in 1st was probably still out of reach. Particularly since on my worst leg, he also tanked it and was only 3 seconds faster than I was.
I found this place to be somewhat thick, with horrible footing, which may have played to my advantage, because those things may slow other people down more than they do me. I also found the map to be pretty hard to read, both in terms of some of the contours being different from what I would have expected, and some of the colors making things tough (light yellow v. light green, and the limestone pavement obliterating contous, though not as badly as the previous map). There were also some places where the fieldwork was a little dubious, bringing luck into play, and a few things that I consider drafting errors (streams shown as pale blue with no black bank lines). Although it's a place where I did quite well, I'm not sure that it's one I'd make a big effort to return to.
That said, the organizers did a great job in terms of the arrangements, with cookout food available, a nice spectator/socializing area at the finish, and absolutely perfect weather. Software incompatibility issues with the SI system had me rolling my eyes, but my results did come out correctly.
Note
Huh. Well, in addition to having done pretty well at the event, WinSplits has a "times without mistakes" option wherein (if I understand correctly), it changes the time on any splits that it judges to be errors to the time it expects you would have done without the error. And doing that shows me in second place (to James Tasker) both days. Implying that I made some costly errors, but I was actually running pretty fast. Since I don't figure I'm in top running shape compared to everybody else right now, I guess this reinforces my theory that the rough footing was advantageous to me, and that I'm good in a relative sense at moving through that kind of stuff.