Race Evaluation
Boulder Dash 2007: Red Day 1
jjcote
| 1. | An embarrassingly bad run. As of the time that I'm writing these comments, I'm in 10th place out of the 11 who have posted splits, despite that fact that of the 15 controls, three of my splits are the fastest, three are second-fastest, and to more are third. That really says something about just how bad the remaining ones were. Ran early so I could work finish/results. No real problem going straight on the first leg, just a tiny hesitiation at the end. | ||||||
| 2. | Running carelessly, but got lucky. | ||||||
| 3. | Just blasted down the hill, because the marsh was such a bulletproof attack point. | ||||||
| 4. | Planned to follow the edge of the marsh around, but it was a little slower than I hoped, and the vertical green lines up above looked to be pretty thick laurel, so I decided to try and go above it. The green turned out to be pretty bad, and I wound up on the trail and attacked down from there. | ||||||
| 5. | |||||||
| 6. | So far so good... | ||||||
| 7. | But it all falls apart here. The trail route around to the right looked too long for my taste, so I decided to go straight. That was dumb. Got pushed to the right by the slope, and eventually wound up on the trails halfway there, way to the right of the line. Took the trail that went directly toward the control, cut off at the bend, continued until I crossed the stream/trail with about 250m to go. Climbed the hill and tried to keep track of the features, but didn't do too well. Passed one control and wasn't sure what feature it was on. Figured that I just needed to continue up until I got to a flattish place. Got up there (or so I thought), and wasn't sure what was what, but I found a control on a boulder. Seemed like it could be the boulder 100m SW of my reentrant, so I tried going NE. Found a control, but it was on a knoll, and I decided that I was pretty lost and needed to relocate, so I headed NW hoping to get to the trail. I did find the trail, but I wasn't sure where I was on it, so I headed uphill looking for something distinctive. Thought I identified a bend, headed into the woods to see if things made sense, they didn't, but then I found a pair or boulders that I reasoned must be the pair 250m W of the control. Headed E, looking for the small marsh, and found a control on a boulder — same one as before. Still made sense for it to be the one that I thought, soI went N, found the marsh, then E back to where I had been before, and then continued a little further and found the reentrant. Ugh, a lot of time had elapsed. | ||||||
| 8. | Well, this was easy enough | ||||||
| 9. | |||||||
| 10. | Disaster #2. I guess I probably got about 80% of the way there, on track, but then did a poor job of map reading, went right, hit the rocks, and then proceded to blunder around, finally attacking from the trail NW of the control. | ||||||
| 11. | Left around the hill, hit the trail, and then got really confused when I came to what looked like a trail junction (because it had a sign!) that I couldn't find on the map (and still can't). Worked my way down the hill and probably drifted pretty far right, probably ending up about 100m S of the control, looking around on cliffs that don't really appear on the map, and eventually realizing that I was on a hill that looked bigger than anything I could see on the map. I spotted Samantha going by higher up on the hill, so I went where she was heading, and I got to the control. | ||||||
| 12. | Down through the green across the trail, and then spent a long time looking at various spurs and knolls until I stumbled onto the right one. | ||||||
| 13. | Samantha was heading into #12 as I was leaving, apparently relocating after having had a disaster looking for #13. Decided I might as well try to salvage something, so I put a push on to see if I could stay ahead of her. | ||||||
| 14. | |||||||
| 15. | Via the road, no problem since I had already seen the last control from the finish. | ||||||
| F. |
Total Time Lost - 00:00:00