Orienteering 3:12:40 [4] 12.8 mi (15:03 / mi)
shoes: Jalas O-shoes
Hard to tell exact distance because my Garmin spaced out on me for part of 14-15 and 15-16, but my distance is an estimate based on where I think I was rather than the straight line my Garmin shows while it had lost satellites. This distance compared to
Straightline: 11.3 km, 426 m of climb
indicates that I did a lot of extra running! So leg by leg:
1: Good leg, off by a little to the right but saw Ross coming from point and corrected.
2: Not a good leg; a parallel error on green hilltops led me to lose some time.
3: Easy, short point
4: Tried to use precision compass but drifted off to the left and had to reorient from the road.
5: Pretty clean point; took road to trail, cut across the woods to another trail, checking off point 18 on my way, and used steep contours off trail to guide me to point.
6: Short point, went a little to the right but corrected.
7: Good point, used ridges.
8: Short point, used a ridgeline again.
9: Pretty good, although I didn't have a clear attackpoint.
10: Worst point of course, made a parallel error involving bends on a trail and missed several opportunites to bail out. Not even sure what happened here--I am waiting for Kevin to give me the quickroute so I can remember where I went.
11: Tried to use precision compass but drifted left to a parallel hilltop; I decided to bail out to the road and found my point on the way.
12: Unintentionally found point 14 first, which, like point 13, was near a trail. So, I went 14, 13, 12, 13, 14.
15: I had been to 15 on #10, which is a long ways off, so I didn't have too much difficulty revisiting this point.
16: At 2:30, I knew I had to make this 1.65 km point in 15 minutes. Unfortunately, my Garmin wasn't the only thing that got disoriented out here; I tried to use precision compass without pace count without a constant read on the terrain, and it failed miserably. A safe route would have been to take the road out to the open land and re-hit 8 and 7 to make 16 into a 230 m point. But I didn't see this option and the woods would have been faster if I had been navigationally accurate.
17, 18, 19: My cleanest points of the course; just short enough for rough compass to work on.
20: Somehow missed the trail to the finish, but trekked through some green stuff to get on it.
Finish: 11 seconds, tied for first place!