Training Log Archive: David_Waller

I just watched Matt Bond's Rentschler route on RG and no longer feel any regret at all for having lost to him. Matt always took the direct through-the-woods routes when I took the wimpy along-the-trail route. I'm glad that Mike's course design enabled someone who chose to navigate to beat someone who chose to run.

Control pickup at Rentschler

A pretty good run at Rentschler, with only a couple of moderate-sized mistakes. There were a lot of good route choice options throughout the entire course. After analyzing some of my mistakes from previous events (e.g., #8 the night before) I decided to try to default more often to the trail-based options. With only a couple of exceptions, I'm pretty happy with most of these decisions.

There were a lot of people running the red course, and I intersected them at #1, #5 (here, a group was standing at the control, planning their next leg), #7, #9, and #10. I saw Matt Bond at #7, and thought that I was ahead of him. Unbeknownst to me, he passed me from 8 to 9, though, and only gained on me from there.

My biggest mistake was my route choice and execution from 8 to 9. I took the road all the way to the trail in the south, but overshot the trail and lost 1.5 minutes having to double back. I also had to stop to tie my shoes at a trail junction. I also botched #16, and probably lost 30 seconds there. Everything else was relatively clean, and whatever time I lost was due to either poor route choices or generally slow speed.

Red - Splits

Event: OCIN New Year's O' Fest
 

Fun Night-O at Rentschler. My controls went: 68, 33, 64, 63, 59, 60, 61, 62, 35, 37, 44, 68, 65, 67. I was quite clean and moderately fast through the first 7 controls, My glasses fogged shortly after punching #7, and I removed them, right before the hardest leg of the course, from 7 to 8. Even so, I think that I executed most of the leg pretty well, veering south of the line to try to stay in white (which was not always white). I probably mistook the long reentrant west of the control for the short one next to it, though. After struggling though the woods there, I ended up on the indistinct trail and decided to bail down to the main trail to get a fresh start. From there, it was relatively easy, although even when I saw the correct downed tree, I stupidly went around it instead of heading straight to the rootstock. I easily lost 8 minutes on this control. I also screwed up the next control (2, #35) quite badly, which is a shame, because it should have been very easy. Lost another 4-5 minutes on that one. The rest was relatively clean. All in all a very fun outing.

Field checking at Gov. Bebb. Checked southern control locations first, then northern ones, and was surprised that I could tell that different people had mapped either region.

C • Congratulations! 1