Orienteering race 1:24:51 [4] 9.8 km (8:39 / km) +415m 7:09 / km
CSU A meet - classic distance. 415 m of climb? Really? Even with the heat, significant even with me being one of the earliest starters, I can't say it felt like I climbed anything like that much. A very good day technically and a good day physically as well resulted in easily the best race relative to my peers I can remember having in rocky glacial terrain. Not sure why this was so much better than West Point, though better recovery between races, better acclimation to heat, and being able to relax somewhat on the many parts of legs on which it made sense to use the trail network rather than having to maintain continuous focus from start to end of long legs are some candidate explanations. The results are quite reminescent of the long at last fall's Ontario Champs - me in the mid 80s, second around 90 and the rest of the field starting another four or five minutes back of that - but it's much easier to be happy now since the results look like that because I ran a good race rather than because I underperformed what should have been possible by much less than the rest of the field. Though it is hard to say just how much of an advantage my relatively early start may have been on this occasion. I tend to think it might account for a few minutes compared to later starters on purely physical grounds but the extent to which heat stress may have induced technical errors strikes me as unknowable.
