Discussion: Skips

Wyatt's comment was that 8 was a good one. If you can see that trail that goes W of #7 (and which was the best route to #7...) (or know it's there) (which I should have)... Saves a rocky/dead pine-y 8-9 run. If you could do 5:00 on 7-9 (looks about the same as 9-10), it's a 5 min saving on the leaders (pro-rate to yr speed).

On the contrary, #16 looks like an about 4:30 win at the leaders' pace; #1, about 4:20; and #3, less than 3 minutes. (You had to know that the Balter part of the map was the fastest to eliminate #3 as a valid skip.)

Paul Bennett was pretty pleased about having skipped #7, and thus avoiding all that climb. I'm not going to try and figure out the time savings, though.

Did anyone consider skipping 6? Its not easy to see from the map, but you save a lot of nasty terrain for a long trail run, good attack on 7 and also perhaps the trickiest control on the course. Getting in and out of 16 was easier than I'd feared, so I still think #1 is the best skip though, although you want others to skip it too to avoid running alone. How you can assess all that in zero time is beyond me.

Sorry, I have no goat splits, as my watch got wet and died at the Pig last week. I was generally with Greg B most of the way, except where he made a pit-stop on the way to #4 - (fortunately) I took a worse route and he still beat me there.
I botched #15 and took a 3 minute error when I should have continued to the easy catch at the trail...very dumb. The pack blew past and that was that. I skipped #16. Fun running with the Irish guys for a while after #12! Congrats to the CSU guys for a great race in tough terrain...after the first 2 mins I never saw them again. Now Ken has to keep that goat-thing for a year - "Haa-haa."

Peter G says

"all 20 ahead of me were under 40 -- who says this has become an old man's sport"

It's only "young" because of the "imports". Of the top 20, runners were born

5 - fSU
1 - Scotland
1 - AUT
3 - CAN
2 - Eire
1 - AUS

(I may be wrong here or there. Sorry).

Yes Vladimir, you may be wrong.
Graeme, M40, born London, England
But it didn't look like an old mans' sport from where I was.

Several items:

1. Having chastised the CSU guys for not sticking around at the awards, I thought I should check the archives to see if I was being unfair. Lo and behold, it seems as though over the years the worst style points have been awarded to the fastest orienteers (M. Platt and S. Crawford prominent among them), as if there was some grand plan to humble the mighty. (In fact, however, the only grand plan was to claim the team win for Western Mass., something which these days is beyond any realm of possibility.)

2. And if we were awarding style points, then some very positive ones would certainly have to go to these same folks from CSU, and Kenny in particular, for offering this very fine web site for conducting the BG post-mortom.

3. I don't know what the ethics these days are regarding posting maps on the web, but it would be nice to be able to see maps/courses that people are posting splits from on attackpoint. If anyone wants to see the BG course, it is at http://users.crocker.com/~pg/
(I'll probably remove it soon before the copyright folks come after me.)

Peter

Seems like I hit the "submit" a couple of extra times! Whoops....

Kenny, if your "wolf" was the size of a medium dog, it was likely a coyote as they've been seen in Westchester County since the '50s. I don't think wolves have bee found here for more than a hundred years and gray foxes are closer to housecat sized. Red foxes are larger and might sometimes be gray but a white tip on long fluffy tail is usually very noticeable.
Nadim, your runner in red was probably Francis Falardeau. I remember you being close behind me at #8, but I wasn't wearing red. In the circle you correctly said we were too far right. And just after leaving #8, I met Francis coming the other way - he either skipped #7 or erred on #8.

Kenny, if your "wolf" was the size of a medium dog, it was likely a coyote as they've been seen in Westchester County since the '50s. I don't think wolves have bee found here for more than a hundred years and gray foxes are closer to housecat sized. Red foxes are larger and might sometimes be gray but a white tip on long fluffy tail is usually very noticeable.
Nadim, your runner in red was probably Francis Falardeau. I remember you being close behind me at #8, but I wasn't wearing red. In the circle you correctly said we were too far right. And just after leaving #8, I met Francis coming the other way - he either skipped #7 or erred on #8.