Running - Road / Track warm up/down (mostly road) 9:39 [2] 1.3 mi (7:25 / mi) +25m 7:00 / mi
ahr:138 max:160 shoes: Brooks Cascadia (lime green!)
Warm-up run before orienteering.
Orienteering race (middle distance) 37:45 [3] *** 5.2 km (7:16 / km) +190m 6:08 / km
ahr:165 max:176 spiked:12/17c slept:5.2 shoes: VJ Twister (US size 10.5) - 2
BOK/U.S. Team fundraiser meet, day 2, middle distance WRE. I had a good, steady run, with only a little over 2 minutes of lost time among about 5 controls. I edged out Jon Torrance by one second for the win. I didn't feel like I was running very fast, but I was thinking for most of the time how it was more important to be clean and smooth.
Running - Terrain warm up/down 10:18 [2] 1.03 mi (10:00 / mi) +25m 9:18 / mi
ahr:132 max:150 shoes: Brooks Cascadia (lime green!)
Easy warm-down jog, mostly in the forest next to the park entrance road.
Running - Trail / Grass (some road, too) 12:00 [2] * 1.33 mi (9:01 / mi) +30m 8:26 / mi
shoes: Brooks Cascadia (lime green!)
Some jogging between controls during U.S. Trail O Champs.
Orienteering (trail O) 1:00:00 [0] ***
spiked:11/14c shoes: Brooks Cascadia (lime green!)
U.S. Trail O Champs. As usual, trail O was fun and interesting on the one hand, and frustrating and bingo on the other. One of my wrong answers was on control 3, where there was a decoy unmapped rootstock a few meters from the mapped rootstock. There was really no robust way to determine which rootstock was mapped. One of the controls was correct relative to the unmapped rootstock, so I choose it, thinking that "none of the above" couldn't possibly be the correct choice in such an ambiguous situation. Boy was I wrong!
The second wrong answer was on control 8, where the location along the road of the viewing point depicted on the solution map differs substantially from the result of a pace count from well-defined points on either side along the road. The result was that I had to pick between a control that seemed correct in direction from what I had established as the viewing point to one that seemed correct relative to the contour feature but was way off in direction. Knowing my pace count couldn't be so far off, I picked direction and was wrong.
The third wrong answer on the third and final timed control was my map reading blunder and I deserved to get it wrong.
There were other controls that I was lucky enough to get correct, despite some sloppiness in the mapping or control placement, which might have shaken my confidence on another day.
Is trail O supposed to be bingo, or is it just that it's too labor intensive to actually put on a trail O without significant technical errors? I think the main problem this time was not the course per se--the course was fine--but that the map was lousy, with significant errors of omission, scale and shape. In my opinion, those errors ruined the integrity of the course. I heard that, on at least one of the distance estimation problem controls, the marker that was supposed to be correct was not placed using even pace counting, let alone a measuring tape. It seems to me that in a discipline such as trail O that is all about being rigorously anal, there is no room for imprecision in the mapping or control marker placement (or any other aspect, really).