Discussion: Also

It's good to have well-defined priorities so you can adequately assess each run. I am pleased by your judicious choice of metric.

It's an excellent metric.

David and I found we were most successful in the corn maze when we never took our thumb or our eyes off the map, and just watched the corn go by out of the corner of our eye.

Whoa. Interesting tactic - I guess it mitigates the main problem of losing contact with the map. I definitely looked at my map much more frequently than in even sprint orienteering. My two main strategies were abstraction and searching for elegantly fast routes. In abstracting, rather than thinking of each turn individually, I mentally combined a set of turns into getting to the other side of a clump, e.g. Fast routes were often longer than the shortest possible but were safe areas where you could run full speed without too much concentration.

Corn maze is a wonderful mental exercise.

Ian, your approach sounds perfect, and obviously it worked.

Taxicab geometry was a very useful concept wherever it could be applied.

@jj: Do you mean minimizing turns / maximizing straight-a-ways?

Basically, yeah. It's a technical term. (Actually, you probably know that.)

Next year try the UPS method.

My mom didn't like left turns either, scouted routes out ahead of time, often on foot, so she wouldn't have to turn left in her car. Ahead of her time.

So I'm not getting how turning right 90% of the time saves miles. I could see it saving time or perhaps gas idling waiting to make the lefts.

Right. Not miles, but gas, time, and in my mother's case, anxiety.

Speaking of corn maze approach, it was pretty obvious to me early on that the way I was holding the map wasn't working out. I was not able to do a good job of keeping my thumb near where I was, and every time I looked up I had to relocate on the map. Not easy. I had my thumb compass on in the hand I held the map in, and I think that might have been a lot of my problem. Didn't need a compass anyway.

Yeah, I found that two hands on the map worked pretty well for the trickier parts.

Makes sense. I wonder if I will remember that by next year.

Remember it this year.

Thanks for the advice. I had certainly forgotten it. Now if I can just keep it in my head for five more days.

:-)