Orienteer 7:51:26 [3] 23.42 mi (20:08 / mi) +2930ft 18:00 / mi
ahr:136 max:188
Tame the Dragon 770 pts by my count but 830 per SLOC. anyway who's counting?
i navved and Erl punched for our 2-person team. the forecast was amazing and this was a perfect way to get a long "time on feet" day before the Mid South double.
overall my nav was pretty good, about 45min of mistakes (10min at XX, which we eventually got and 35min at 43, which we dropped). this is my longest stretch at nav and i wasn't overwhelmed at the end mentally, which is great! physically i was tired but not cooked.
i would say highlights of the day were running with Drake for a few controls (31, 4X) after my major bust at 43/31 and then nailing the route to 51 ahead of him. we split up after that, but he ended up w more points so it was a battle victory not a war. but that 51 was a confidence booster after my disappointment at 43/31. i also had a good approach to 23, picking between identical spurs, but figuring it out correctly based on the reentrant shape below. felt good on that one.
overall i could have designed a more efficient route probably. went CCW around the airport to start was not the best idea for a non-sweep route, but i hate finishing around the airport and just wanted to get it out of the way. the route from 45-55 was a long time without points, but the controls before that made it seem worth it at the time.
made it around, headed north, had "the big screwup" approaching 43...i was careless in my departure from the water control and "just went north", then when we hit the big road i was careless again about which hilltop to use as an attackpoint, then when we got in the wrong reentrant i didn't immediately check my compass for the feature orientation...just kept trying to force it. finally had to bail and then guess at the relocation...figured that big E/W reentrant was the only place we could be and matched up terrain, and was able to get 31 pretty straightforwardly after that (also as we went into the reentrant i was thinking "if the flag isn't here i really have NO idea what to do next"...but it was there).
got thru the middle, figured we had a chance at getting all of the 20s (which meant a bonus) so re-set out route with time checks to accomplish that. one minor detour to a water control because i was low and wasn't positive we would have another chance in the remaining 2 hours. it was also "warm" (60s) so just didn't want to run out.
made some good choices at the end which were doable with our nav/speed and finished with a few minutes to spare, but not enough to get any more points.
normally i put time estimates on my map, this time i didn't bc just ran short of planning time, and i think it hurt me to not have the micro-goals ("be at CP 15 in 2 hours") as motivation and better route adjustment opportunities.
food/drink was great, legs were OK, maybe could have gone a bit faster overall, but didn't want to out-run my nav either.