Orienteering race 32:09 [4] *** 2.84 km (11:20 / km) +80m 9:56 / km
spiked:12/18c
West Point Sprint @ Camp Buckner
What an awful, awful race. I thought I was ready for the Sprint, but obviously not.
AP reports 11:06 in lost time, which is certainly on the conservative side, as it only reports 3 legs with lost time, and reality was at least six with significant losses. As it was, I had more lost time than the top 30 finishers, combined.
It started with holding the map upside down and I couldn't get things to make sense, and then I recovered with a bad route to the first control. Did fine on C2-C4, but then I completely lost track of the 1:5 scale (and the 2.5m contours), overran (and overclimbed) C5 badly and went right off the map. I tried to relocate off of the water tower at the top of the hill, but couldn't find it on the map. There were also some big trails up there, but I couldn't get them to line up with any trails on the map - it never occurred to me that I could be off the map. I ran well past C6 also, and saw an obvious rootstock that was almost on my line. It ended up being the wrong code and I guessed the wrong rootstock on the map and had to try again. At that point Angelica and someone else punched just ahead of me. I had a nice back-and-forth battle with her the rest of the way, as I kept running ahead, getting a lead for a few controls, then making an error.