Training Log Archive: Linear Ice

Sprint was at England-Idlewild park; lots of dark green and trails, especially in the Frisbee golf area.... but even the dark green had lots of little pathways. So the biggest challenge was just remembering general bearing while moving left and right to avoid bad vegetation.
AND... I was very careful to look at the control numbers so as not to mispunch now that the Sprint rules allow for closer controls (THANK YOU IAN!!)

I had a hard time seeing the trails on the map (made an error on contact lens choice in the morning), so there were a couple of "hmm" moments but mostly I felt really good about the course and was just on the edge of "skilled" and "darn lucky" so I couldn't have gone faster. But then I learned that Kathleen beat me by two minutes! How did she do it? I will have to wait for splits to find out. (Results just came out... Kathleen beat me by about 30 seconds, not so unreachable I guess). But since she had a horrible control on Day 1, I was still in #1 spot coming out of the Sprint.
Here's how I think this Pig event is scored although I'm not sure: 1000 points to top runner in each category in each race, then % of 1000 for everyone else based on % of time. Top 3 scores count towards final placements. So after the Sprint, I still needed to run at least one more strong event.

This map was on mountain bike trail hills, with lots and lots of trails but mostly to distract rather than to run on, almost all green/dark green on the map. It was very hard to see any contour lines because of all the colors. I made some bad errors, especially on 10 and 12. On the rest, I was average.
10: I was looking for a pit in an area surrounded by various patches of vegetation, and totally missed that there was a great catching feature (the two trails) not that far beyond it. So instead of going to the trails, I swung back to open space to try to figure out what was what. I saw disorienteer off and on between controls maybe 7-13? and she was just keeping up a nice steady pace and I was scrambling around..... so I knew I wasn't making much speed progress between one control to the next.
On 12, I completely misled myself to think I was in the wrong area when in fact I wasn't too far off, so I took an exercusion over to another hill and its raspberry or other scratchy bushes, then told myself I was an idiot and battled them backward. Remarkably, I am getting so much faster at making big errors and then recovering. That one only took 9 minutes.

Finish time was 2 minutes behind leaders (3rd place); Sandy seemed pleased which makes me happy to think that maybe I'm getting to be someone that people like to beat. =)
(Oh, i just realized that maybe other F50s came in afterwards. They seemed to start all of us at the end. So who knows how far I am behind leaders! Guess I'll have to wait for results.)

Middle - Saturday5 Green - Splits

Sprint Brown/Green - Splits