Race Evaluation
WCOC Macedonia Meet: Blue
PBricker
| 1. | +03:00 | It was immediately apparent that this was going to be one of those really stupid days. Basically did what Clint did, but in slow motion, doubling the time lost. At one point I stood there wondering if I was even looking at the right part of the map. When I finally found the clearing, I still didn't spot the flag right away. | |||||
| 2. | A yellow leg: just what I needed. Trail to stream. | ||||||
| 3. | Crossed to the right side of the reentrant and slowly climbed right to it. | ||||||
| 4. | +10:00 | This was a good learning experience. When I look at the map, I see the boulders on the hillside at the top, so it seemed safest to sweep along the top of hillside. Lots of boulders but no flag, and not wanting to risk stopping short, I probably went a 150 meters past. Decided maybe it was tucked away below one of the boulders below me, so this time I swept a tad lower down the hillside. Probably went past a 100 meters. Then decided to come back along the top and went right to it. | |||||
| 5. | +02:00 | Looking for paths through the green lead me to miss it to the south, where I hit some wet stuff. Saw John Goodwin (he and Gail R. were the only people I ever saw due to my late start). Asked him if he'd been to the bare ground and he pointed north. But the vegetation looked ugly that way, so I went northwest to the spur west of the control. Then cut over. | |||||
| 6. | spike! | ||||||
| 7. | +16:00 | Like Clint I had it my head the reentrant would be green, and I wandered into the "mountain laurel" hell northwest of the control, checking out reentrants that were obvioiusly too small. (My hip doesn't do well climbing over laurel, so I was barely moving.) Then I headed in the right direction, looked down the hill toward the river and saw a flag. I decided it must be 13 (and was too lazy to check it out), so I went back into the laurel a second time before relocating on the marshy area and going back to the flag I had seen. | |||||
| 8. | I gave up putting any physical effort into this, and my navigating was clean for the rest (but see 10 and 13). Here I went around the worst of the laurel to the right to the indistinct trail and read the knolls to it, all walking. | ||||||
| 9. | A perfect leg. Went right of line to avoid any unnecessary climb, and read the rocks and contours right to it. Spike. They should all be like this. | ||||||
| 10. | This one wasn't my fault! The east side of the pond shows a strip of white all the way to the control. In fact, it was totally impassable along the pond and I found myself litterally crawling through small spaces in the thick laurel. Maybe I should have bailed all the way to the east until I got out of the laurel, but who knew how long that would take; so I stayed near the pond. Since I did the route I planned and spiked the countrol, I won't record the 5 minutes lost. (Clint must be a monster if he did this route in 7 plus minutes.) | ||||||
| 11. | Slow, mostly walking. Spiked it. | ||||||
| 12. | Jogging some down the spur. Spiked it. | ||||||
| 13. | +01:00 | Again I took the route I planned, which I think was fine: around the right catching a bit of trail, then stood staring down the slope to where the flag should be: nothing. Climbed down (slowly) to where the flag should be, looking in all directions: still nothing. It was tucked behind a tree 5 10 meters in front of me. | |||||
| 14. | Jogging. Felt dehydrated, having been out a long time with no water. These final easy legs would have been fun to blast: if only I could have. | ||||||
| 15. | Crossed at the bridge. | ||||||
| 16. | |||||||
| 17. | |||||||
| F. |
Total Time Lost - 00:32:00