Training Log Archive: pi

Warm-up.

COC Middle distance. Bronze medal! Started carefully and ran all the way around to the first. Had a sense right away that the navigation would be critical today, with a labyrinth of trails and low visibility in the woods. Got the first 4 controls slowly, but without problem. On the long trail run around to 5 I read ahead a few controls. Coming into 5 I was expecting the little cliff to face me, but in fact I had misread the map and it was facing away from me. I literally stood one meter from the control, but never looked down. Ran around for 1 minute until I came back and spotted the flag. Tried to forget about this and settled back into the routine, got 6 to 8 fairly clean and ran trail around to 9 and again to 10. Took the straight route to 11. Nailed 13, think this was my only winning split! Was too far right to 15, in fact I saw control 20 just to my right and I think I lost 20 seconds here. First two controls after the spectator control in the arena went ok, but then I got confused by a lot of ribbons in the forest on the way to 19, which made me hesitate and slow down. Think I lost 20 seconds here to. To control 20, the last control, I tried to push a little bit extra and since I had seen it earlier on the course I was aggressive on the approach.

Running into the finish chute, I felt I had a decent race, but not enough for a medal. It turned out I had the margins on my side today, narrowly edging out Nick for the bronze! My goal before the weekend was to come home with one medal, either in the Middle or the Long, so that felt really good!

Great terrain today for a Middle and a good course! I think the 1:10000 map had the wrong symbols sizes, probably shrunk from the 1:7500 which seemed to have the correct sizes.

Middle distance, M21E - Splits