Discussion: Congrats!

That was a great finish! Your club mates and competitors helped, but you also have a very good training base, and are a very good orienteer! It pays off, though I think what really did it was that new shiny CSU kit.

Thank you, Alex. To be perfectly honest, I owe much of the fact that I was able to build up a training base to my CSU teammates and other orienteers as well. Specifically, your direct advice and ONA articles, Larry and Sara Mae's advice on equipment and their help in procuring it, Kenny's attack point website, his and Boris' training logs, and Greg Walker's Catching Features computer game were all powerful motivators. So were the incredible Harriman training camp put together by Sergei, Kseniya and Nadezhda, the A-meets and the local meets put together by the USMAOC, WCOC and HVO folks in the NYC area, and all the training camps and A-meets I attended elsewhere in the United States. Hopefully, consistency in training and in navigational performance on my part over the coming years will prove you right when you say that I am a good orienteer. By the way, the new shiny CSU kit was very helpful, indeed - this time especially due to the fact that other CSU orienteers wore it as well. This enabled me to see them much better in the woods, even in the periphery of my visual field!

I am likewise really impressed and think you did a fantastic job on this race! Soon enough it will be you leading the pack and some other orienteers watching to see where the CSU yinyang is headed! Go CSU!

Thank you, Ross. Your faith in me is hard to believe. We definitely missed you at the Billygoat.

Nice one Misha!

Thank you, Brendan.

Congrats Misha! Very nice effort. Now you know the speed through the woods, next will be to do it following your own course. Keep the excellent training going.

It has been so nice to see you getting back into the orienteering scene last year and this. It is also very impressive to see the progress you have made in getting back into shape for running through the woods, and to be getting back into better and better navigational skills. I think that in many ways, mass start events like the Billygoat can be really valuable training for doing improved navigation on your own in conventional races, if you can devote some of your mental effort to figure out what the guys nearby are apparently focusing on, and why sometimes they split up and go somewhat different ways for a while because they have chosen different handrails, or are making different tradeoffs between, say, climb and navigational complexity. It is very different watching it evolve in real time relative to talking about it after the race. In any case, a great run and a great result!

Thank you, Eric and George. Your advice is always well-received and your kudos always mean a great deal to me. Eric, yours is an excellent description of the ways in which this year's Billygoat was, in fact, such a fun and useful learning experience for me.

Wow! Fantastic result. You've come a long, long way since we ran the Highlander together! I only wish there were a chance of keeping up with you today...

:-) Thank you, Mr. Walker! The way I see it, though, not much has changed. You are, in all likelihood, still a much better orienteer than I am. True, I may be physically faster than you, as I was when I was "vetting" vicinities of controls ahead of you in the Highlander. However, Attackpoint shows that you have participated in many more orienteering events in the years since then. I wouldn't be surprised if you were to have gotten far ahead of me in terms of navigational ability.

Misha, very impressive! You finished ahead of a lot of really good orienteers. What a vast improvement you've made since the long-gone days when you and I used to battle it out on BAOC Green courses!

Thank you, Dennis. I am glad that, at least, I managed to keep going to BAOC local meets during the ten years that I was in California. My training and my participation in A-meets, sadly, went down steadily over that period of time. I am really happy to have renewed motivation to train now. It certainly makes orienteering competition that much more fun. Speaking of A-meets, it was great to see you and the rest of the BAOC contingent at the sprint championship at Morehead State last month.

Great to see you then, too, Misha. Hopefully that will happen more often since you'll be at more A-meets.

Dennis, I should say that I do not expect to do better at regular A-meets than I did at the Billygoat. It is a fact that the kinds of orienteering competitions I do best at are the ones where one is allowed to follow other people. To me, this makes total sense. I hope you do not mind if I try to use an analogy between orienteering and academia in order to explain why this makes sense to me. Please let me know if I am using the term "analogy" incorrectly here. Also, please let me know if the analogy itself does not make sense to you. Let us say that following and leading in orienteering are like learning and teaching in academia. Let us also say that navigational skills in orienteering are like skills with technology and mathematics in academia. In academia, I cannot say that I am better at technology or at mathematics than other scientists. On the other hand, the one academic skill at which I believe I can be better than other scientists is teaching and learning. By the same token, in orienteering I do relatively better in events that emphasize leading and following and relatively worse in traditional events, which emphasize one's own navigational skill. Regardless of how well I do at the A-meets that are coming up, however, I very much look forward to seeing you there!

You're certainly using the term analogy correctly, and your specific analogy is apt. And I certainly by no means meant to imply that you're now expected to have great performances at A-meets. Just noting that you are training for and enjoying the sport, increasing the likelihood that you would attend A-meets.

Of course, one of the joys of orienteering is that there is always more to learn, so that one can keep improving even though one naturally slows down with age. The more you orienteer (and think about what you need to do to improve), the more you will improve. Excellent sport for us cerebral guys :-)

Yes. I absolutely love this sport. Thank you for all your feedback and thoughts, Dennis.