Orienteering race 27:49 [5] 4.5 km (6:11 / km) +145m 5:19 / km
Buffalo - Middle. It took me a full week to recover from the Billygoat, but after the hard ran from the last weekend, I finally felt good. Will was starting right behind me (2 min), so I took off right from the start hoping to not let him catch me. Was a bit cautious to the first bag trying to look ahead, but quickly realized the good quality of the print and began to push. Was really clean through the first four bags, then unnecessary climbed the steep spur just before #5 instead of going around it, perhaps losing 10-12 seconds there. Was a bit high on # 7 and just slow walking uphill to #8. Nine was where I had my biggest mistake of the day, I blasted down the trail on the left, then crossed the woods till I hit the rootstock, and stayed a bit on the trail before falling down towards the stream instead of running down right away. Ended up overshooting the bag, and had to make a U-turn as I was already almost at the small bridge, lost 15-20 sec in there.
Then Erin, who started 2 minutes in front of me, popped from the right and we ran up to the # 10 together. I punched first and then led to # 11. Erin then got in front of me on the way to # 12 and I stayed behind him till half way to #14 where I cut into the green a bit sooner than he did and punched just ahead of him. There we picked up Igor, who was in front of us to #15. We took, the trail going around the left side of the green stuff and I think Erin and I pulled just a bit away from Igor at #16. Then the long finish sprint began, me trying to keep up with Erin on really fast trail. We did manage to screw up a bit by cutting too early through the clearing instead of taking the trail all the way down, but we pushed so hard that it hardly mattered. I saw no sign of Will at the finish and began looking at my watch. Then, just like the Punisher, he showed up, quite casually, in the finish chute with less than a minute to spare. Still, I was really happy with my race and this was probably as close as I've gotten to beating Will in a really long while.
I want to say that i really enjoyed the course setting today, this was a case of really "intelegent" course design. As compared to the last year middle course in Rochester, where we were forced to climb steep slops up and down quite a few times, it wasn't the case here. The utilization of traversing legs, allowed for different route choices, staying up, down, or contouring, that made the course a lot faster too.