Hiking warm up/down (Trail) 20:37 [2] 0.93 mi (22:10 / mi) +223m 12:42 / mi
slept:8.0 weight:189lbs
Cunningham State Park, MD. From the Manor Area parking lot, I hiked up to the start of QOC's Platformpalooza 2017 event. Jon Torrance had put together a base map and added some features to it. The start was near the top of Bob's Hill.
Orienteering race (Foot) 2:18:02 [4] **** 9.1 km (15:10 / km) +520m 11:48 / km
spiked:20/23c
QOC: Platformpalooza at Cunningham State Park, MD. I made sure I'd get my training in today, running Blue. The hills were steep but in between thge nice parts there were also areas of deadfall and stony ground to make me work. I blew #1 pretty badly. On #1, I had gotten too low. Since I'd crossed some earlier unmapped but distinct ditches, when I hit one that turned out to be just south of #1, I turned back, thinking I was at a different one that was leading toward #15. I'll chalk this up to getting used to the map. The deadfall up high contributed to me not focusing well enough.
After that I hit other controls pretty well. One of the hardest was #13. I came through the green on an old roadbed for that but the roadbed got slow with deadfall. When I emerged through the green, I was too low and hunting with Charles Carrick. I climbed and found it first. I went straight for most of the controls and didn't lose as much time as AP shows for me. I was just slow climbing. There were some course corrections along the way. The few items Jon was able to add to the map like Lidar based vegetation mapping, some of the rock, and some rootstocks helped me correct when I needed it. This was pretty fun on a pretty warm day. I could see QOC having an A-meet here, but think the courses would have to be set to be shorter or with less climb, or both. When I finished I thought I had climbed 701m, but I'd forgotten that I had reset the settings on my watch, and it was displaying feet climbed, not meters. My GPS track was also set to Smart Recording and the track displays a lot of turns that I hadn't done. I was moving in straight lines most of the time, except when crossing the deeper reentrants.