Training Log Archive: ParkSchool

This was the race that really mattered to me. I had sized up the competition as best I could and thought I had a realistic chance to fulfill one of my longstanding orienteering goals of placing on Red in an A-Meet. And everything seemed to be falling into place. I had been a little tentative heading to #2 but had nevertheless spiked it and then had a series of good controls. By #5, I had gotten close enough to glimpse Tom Svobodny, a runner ranked similarly to me who had started perhaps 2-3 minutes earlier. I was briefly confused on #7, but didn't feel I had wasted more than a few seconds, and then I was delighted to see Tom again heading into #11 only about 8-10 seconds in front of me. And then the thought hit me that I actually was on the verge of accomplishing my most cherished goal for the weekend. All I had to do was navigate the long leg to #12 and I would be fulfilled. But then I choked. Tom seemed to be heading too far right, so I cleverly ignored him and kept on course to pick up the trail I was planning to run for the first half of the leg before running along a broad ridge and then navigating more carefully for the last 250 m. But something didn't seem right about the location where I had hit the trail, and all of a sudden I was worrying that I was on some different, perhaps unmarked trail. Or maybe I was on the right trail, but not where I should be which might make it difficult to recognize my planned departure point. And so I foolishly departed the trail trusting myself to find a smaller trail running above the stream that ran parallel but maybe 125 m left of the direct line to #12. Needless to say, this was not a success. I found I was easily confused by all the reentrants crossing my path and very poor at judging the scale of the contours on the open hillside. As a result, I wound up stopping short and running up and down the wrong reentrant, even though I had not crossed a trail that should have intersected my path and even thought there was not nearly the volume of rocky features that should have been visible near the control.

It was a rookie move, but even after this 2-3 minute error, I was still under 10:00 min/km, and I still had hopes that my time might sneak into third place as I pushed to the finish line. But such was not the case. I wound up in fifth place 2:34 short of my goal.

Now that the splits are available, it is clear that I was 30 seconds behind Joe Sackett for third place even before my error, so it might still have been a stretch to overtake him. But at the time of the event, all I could think was that I had had a chance to achieve my most challenging yet still realistic orienteering goal and had blown it by panicking on the last difficult control. It did not put me in the best frame of mind for the upcoming sprint.

I even thought of skipping the sprint, but as I had no particular expectations for the goat event on Sunday, I decided I might as well get my money's worth while I was in St. Louis. My performance was notably sloppy with three sizable errors. My worst mistake occurred near the end where two successive controls lay along the edge of a stream. The woman ahead of me checked out the control I was heading for, but then didn't punch and headed away from the finish. I assumed we had both hit the stream beyond the first control and so unproductively (and surely improperly as well) altered my course to search the banks too far downstream. We both finally recognized that we were in the wrong place and went back to the original control. She then added insult to injury by chasing me down in the sprint to the finish. All in all, it was an uninspired performance.

Hawn sprint - Splits

Middle: RED - Splits

Grunt - Splits