Ottawa Fall Festival Long Course - Lac Philippe
A gorgeous day to be in the Gatineau Hills.
Although a little chilly...
I was happy with yesterday's races - definitely not perfect, but a step in the right direction. One significant error in 26 legs, and it only cost me half a minute. I told 'Bent last night that no matter what happened today, I'd consider it a successful weekend. Well... it's a good thing I meant what I said because today's race was horribly unsuccessful.
I started behind world O champion Tero, who crossed his legs and did a few forward bends in each direction while waiting at the start line. (Immediately copied by me.) I've been working to overcome a history of messing up the first control. In this weekend's races, I won the 1st split in the sprint and was within 20 seconds of the best split in the two other races - a big improvement over past disasters. On my way to today's first control, I was surprised to pass an occupied site in a campground that we'd been told would be closed. I would have been even more surprised if PhattyJR and 2-Min had stepped out of their tent just then! Apparently they heard me run by.
By the 4th control, I was leading the race - and then it all fell apart. I thought I'd chosen a solid attackpoint for #5 - leaving a lakeshore at an obvious point and climbing a steep hill near the little re-entrant where my boulder would be found. It seemed a little less terrific after I'd waded a waist-deep stream with chunks of ice in it (avoidable, but shorter that way). When I got to the top of the hill, neither the hilltop nor the re-entrant were as obvious as I'd hoped, and I wandered for 40 days and 40 nights (or so). I met other wanderers looking for the same control - even The Kempster said it gave her some trouble. (We'd started from the same attackpoint about 30 seconds apart, and I was surprised to see her when I got up there.) The flag was quite low behind a boulder, and I probably passed nearby a few times without seeing it. But I also went lots of places where I had no business going and, unfortunately, kept convincing myself of new and wonderful explanations for where I might be. I found a couple of controls from other courses and located similar features on my map and tried to navigate to my control that way. The terrain was a lot lumpier up there than it looked on the map - I guess the 5m contours hid the smaller stuff. So I wasn't sure exactly which features the mystery controls were on, and I tried a couple of options for each. A highlight was arriving at one of these controls at the same time as Tero. I just took a step back and watched him sail through smoothly. Within a minute, Mike Smith ran up with a wink and asked, "Did you just see a tall Frenchman run by?"
Embarrassingly, it took me about 45 minutes to bail to a major trail to the east to relocate. In hindsight, I should have done that almost immediately when I realized that my original plan hadn't worked. I guess my brain was so focused on the attackpoint that I had chosen on the west side that the eastern boundary of the area seemed really far away. But it wasn't, and once I got out there, I relocated easily and took just a few minutes to find the stoopid control. Yikes, a 54-minute split in a race that took under 2 hrs.
Given that a good result wasn't possible with most of the course still remaining, I treated it as mental toughness training. I ran from #5 to the end pretending that I was still a contender, winning the next 3 splits after my big error. I finished 6th of 9 racers in my category, about 22 minutes off the pace - better than I deserved. A couple of positive takeaways... If I remove the one bad leg from the results and just look at the other 11 legs, I was fastest by almost 12 minutes. I won 4 splits today - much better than either of the races yesterday that went well. So it's not all bad news, but wow, that's one spectacularly bad result! :-) The curse of Barb's Long Races continues, but at least this time it was limited to one big error that I can learn a lot from.
One other positive was meeting up with 2-Min and PhattyJR at the finish line. Nice to see their friendly faces after such a bad blow-up. It was a loooong drive home - what would I do without CBC Radio?