Discussion: Perfect Race

No orienteer ever has a perfect race. You always have to have a respectable list of things you could have done better as part of the post-race discussion. Part of the deal.

That's why we keep doing it, right? The problem is that once you get better, things that weren't seen as mistakes previously suddenly are. But that's why we love it! (Becky Carlyle, 21 years, still no perfect race).

I´ve been at this since 1966 - can´t say I´ve had mine yet!

I may have had a perfect race once. But it took a pretty degenerate course to do it.

...not even Thierry has a perfect race. But then he counts 9 seconds lost as a bad race - perspectives tend to change...

Yeah, it's sort of a moving target, isn't it? Even if I were to some day have something I considered a perfect race, no doubt the next day I'd be pondering all the things that went wrong.

There was one race where I didn't hesitate once or lose any time whatsoever on map-reading. Unfortunately, I retired in the start corridor after running into a tree.

Ah, I found it. July 10, 1996, Manitou Lake (that's at altitude). 1.25 km, 6 controls, time 5:47, 2nd place. Christoph Zurcher did it in 5:13.

One will never have a "perfect" race if too critical, by definition I suppose. Blur the analysis a bit, as in Impressionism. If one is then very satisfied, it was probably "perfect" (at last, a race to feel good about...:).

oh wow, I think you just described why I have never been able to enjoy Impressionist paintings.

For comparison, my "perfect race" was the equivalent of a "perfect" work of art, like this:

I was standing just behind that fellow, viewing Jackson Pollock's well-known "Petit l'Absence", painted after his acme of perfection.

The greater the effort, possibly the less the concentration (at some point) - and the more "impressionistic" the forest.