Orienteering race 2:53:52 [4]
Marcus is one of my favorite teammates but we don't race together that often due to my psychological issues with racing with people infinitely stronger / faster than I am and my fear of letting them down. A race like the Snowshoe Raid was perfect for us to do together as Marcus doesn't navigate and can therefore only go as fast as I can read the map! :)
I haven't done this race in a couple of years and felt like I had no idea how many controls we could get, how fast we would move, or how long it might take us to get back. Picture Bash with her map board, string and pins and my pre-race planning was exactly the opposite! We selected a "best case scenario" Plan A and a back-up Plan B and decided at what CPs we'd review / revise the route. I knew that the plan was likely conservative but preferred to be conservatively successful than ambitiously fail.
We ended up having a very clean race. Although Marcus doesn't nav, he's got a hawkeye for spotting CPs off the distance which can come in really handy! He tolerated me talking through my route to each CP and was patient when I insisted on taking bearings so that we didn't become reliant on the tracks. We were able to pretty much execute all of our Plan A, with the exception of skipping 78 in order to start heading back with lots of time. This allowed us to pick up 81 which we hadn't necessarily intended on doing. We didn't split up in the matrix and chickened out of D, which is my only regret of the race as I am sure we had time to get it on the way down the hill.
Given that I didn't feel very confident going into this, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. What perfect weather we had and it was great to see everyone!