GLOF Long / Ontario Championship - Almost all my A Meet Long orienteering races plunge into disaster, usually on a long leg. It makes no sense that an adventure racer should be good at Sprints and bad at Long courses, but that's how it is. Maybe it's a concentration problem. I go into every Long race believing that I'm finally going to banish the curse - and so far, I've always been wrong. But today I came close.
Running down the hill from the start, I was surprised to see that the first leg was long - over 1 km with no obvious route choice. There was a curve in the trail and I started away from it in one direction, then circled back to it. (Luckily, I couldn't hear Hammer laughing at me from above.) I took a fairly straight route to #1 using trails where I could. In spite of the time wasted scratching my head at the start, this might have been my best-ever result on a long leg - 3rd fastest split of 28 men and women on our course (13:51). Yahoo!
The leg to #3 was another long one - about 1.2 km - and I wasn't as lucky. After doing the hard part, I had an easy trail run to an obvious attackpoint for the control but I got over-enthusiastic and decided to cut the corner between two trails instead of running to their junction. Unfortunately, when I left the trail, I wasn't where I thought I was. I had to scramble across a steep-sided creek instead of crossing a nice bridge, then when I reached the main trail up above, I wasn't 100% sure which direction to turn. I guessed incorrectly (although in hindsight, the first guess should have been the other way) and had to turn around. Argghhh!!! About 7-8 minutes wasted there. Then I made what felt like a minor error on the way to #4 but Winsplits tells me it was worth 3-4 minutes. That must have been a bad route choice as well since the error didn't take that much time.
I punched #4 and BOOM, someone slammed a baseball bat into my skull. WTF??!!? I was seeing stars - and when they cleared, I also saw a log at forehead level which my hat brim had hidden from my peripheral vision. I was shaken up and in pain and wondered if I should stop racing. As I stumbled down the hill, I saw Valerie and told her what had happened - just in case I didn't show up at the finish. From that point on, I kept trying to analyze whether I was getting stupid or uncoordinated. The problem is, I always spend part of any orienteering race feeling stupid or uncoordinated, so it was really hard to tell!
It seems that a good smack on the noggin was exactly what I needed, since my orienteering and running improved steadily after that. My splits for #8/#9/#10 were 2nd/3rd/2nd of 28. I finished 2nd in my category (9th on the course), 8 minutes behind Marketa, which was just fine by me. I didn't quite banish the curse but this Long race was much less disastrous than usual.
So over the weekend, I came home with a full set - Ontario Champs gold, silver and bronze . Using the cool race analysis tools, it appears that my speed, endurance and strength were fine but navigation skills were the limiting factor. On average, my route choice and execution were good but not great. I haven't orienteered much this year and you just can't fake it at a meet like this. But that's OK - at least I know what I have to work on.
Awesome weekend overall. Excellent job by all the GHO volunteers and Valerie!