Wow. I'm really bad at this sport. Sometimes it seems I do the right things, or is it just luck. If I always was wrong, then at least I'd be consistent.
On the bright side, being slow allows you to add more time in attackpoint.
Going to control #:
1) Cautious, but found it pretty well. Took a route where I had to go straight down a steep hill. (6/11)
2) OK (3/11)
3) OK, should have done the trails to avoid the hill. (4/11)
4) TERRIBLE. Complete miss. 10+ minutes. Not confident where the mini path was, so I meandered, not using compass terribly well. Should have gone down to road and pace counted. (11/11)
5) OK. Picked a good attackpoint (5/11)
6) Nailed it with the compass (2/11)
7) Nailed it again - pace counting was very effective - but walked it (6/11)
8) Very long haul. Pretty good, decided to do a lot of paths to get over there. However, once again had trouble finding/using small path starting at radio tower (path? deer trail?). Found control by luck, I suppose. (4/11)
9) Took roundabout route on purpose so that I'd have a good attack point. The pace counting worked great for that. (4/11)
10) got distracted by the deer (blame the deer). Once again, didn't really find the little trail, and got off to the side. At that point, should have done the road and accepted 100m of back-track. (11/11)
11) Nothing left in tank for a sprint. (10/11)
Food - the gingerbread bars were awesome.
Lessons learned:
-be sure of your attackpoint
-use handrails
-Do pace counting to find the mini-trail you are looking for
-Need to get better at reading and using elevation markings.
-Have a plan - don't just say I'll recognize something when I get there.
-Need to get better at identifying / staying on indistinct trails. My confidence got shot in the first half of the run, and then I avoided them altogether - which cost a lot of time.
Should be interesting when the splits are posted whether my feelings about each control are consistent with how I did relative to others on each:
Here they are:
control# 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 overall
place (of 11) 6 3 4 11 5 2 6 4 4 11 10 6
Interesting that Attackpoint nails 2 main misses:
4, 10, but also calls out a miss on 9, which was pretty good in relation to others. Of course, it only had a sample of 2 to work from.
Looking at DD's GPS graph - he goes pretty directly without many bobbles at all.
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Results on ROC site - even taking away my 10 minute complete miss, I'd be 10+ minutes out of the top 3. Long way to go still....
http://roc.us.orienteering.org/results/results2009...