Orienteering race 55:50 [4] *** 2.99 mi (18:40 / mi) +164m 15:57 / mi
Western States Championships Day 3 - Classic Brown. Scoring for the competition is based on best two out of three days, with scores relative to the class winner. After two days, I'm in third place behind Belgian Linda Verbraken and Sue Kuestner. So my strategy was to push as hard as I could. Even if I beat Sue, that might not be good enough if I didn't have a good score relative to Linda. For the last few days we've been watching Disney movies and I took the Dory approach - "just keep running."
One minor mistake at number 1, going to the rocks on the spur just to the east of the control. Interestingly, it seems almost everyone made this same error. I recoverd from it quickly enough that Attackpoint didn't even flag it. It does, however, show a loss of 38 seconds on number 6. I chose to go up the reentrant and over the top. I ended up going down the cliffs further to the right than planned, so that loss is probably hesitation checking out all of the cliff bottoms on the way to the control. Or maybe it was just a lot faster to run around the bottom.
Sue beat Linda today and rightfully took the Western States title. I ended up third overall, just barely squeaking it out ahead of Kathleen Lennon. A great set of races that really kept me moving!