Discussion: Psychological disadvantage?

Both Dick Arnett and I slightly 'lost' some time on the one at the foot of the unmapped earth bank. But how much time did we really lose for real, since all of us lost time there?

Whenever something slows me down, such as rain (last week), snow, mud (last week), stream crossings (last week), misplaced controls (this week), I just tell myself "hey everyone else is doing the same course as me and hit the same problem as me." Unless it was route-choice influenced, then I let myself be bugged by it. However, if you can let it make you go faster, then it may be good to be concerned about losing time.

Your thoughs?

Well, its a good point that if you're going slow & having problems, others probably are too. That can be a good incventive/motivator to keep going when you think "I've been out here 2 hours and I'm hardly moving". When I'm having a good race, I rarely notice elapsed time. When I finished, I was surprised at how long I'd been out.

I can't say that any controls this week were actually mis-placed. My opinion is that the circles were accurately centered. But, placing a control on an unmapped feature (earth bank that was not on the map) was a bit of a technical lapse that you should not see. The control description should match the map. He could have called it east foot of spur, or better, we should have touched up the map, adjusted the spur shape a hair, and added the earth bank. The control circle could maybe be half a mm farther south.

Keep in mind that HW is a 15 year old map, originally done for 1:15,000. So there are bound to be some issues when it is used for local meets at 1:10,000 or smaller.

You're right about the incentive. I was in a trail race the other day that started in waves. It was helpful to think that if I only made up 1 second on the waves ahead of me I would be faster than them. So it helps me in adversity to think, yes this is hard, but I am going to deal with it just a bit more effectively and thus make up some ground.

Mike, did you get my e-mail about the Hawn meet? I know you are awful busy, but just a comment or two would be really helpful.

Thanks for the reminder, Rudy. I'll see what I can put together. I did enjoy Hawn very much. Although I enjoyed the Grunt, I think you'd have had more people if you'd had an additional "A" day on Sunday.

I think we suspected that going in, but the synergy w/ the Grunt was there. Maybe next time we will split it up. Thanks.