The sprint and middle here at WUOC haven’t gone as well as the long distance but I have been able to take some valuable experience from them and I’m pumped for first leg of the relay tomorrow!
Here is the men’s and women’s maps from the sprint.
The sprint was quite a blur for me and I never really got my navigation ahead of the leg. I lost time being generally unsmooth through the first 7 controls. I picked the fastest route on the long leg to 8 and was smooth through the next few controls until my brain failed again leaving 11 and I ran the wrong way for 10 seconds before realising. This wasn’t a great race for me and I think my failure to get on top of my navigation shows that I need more training and high pace and also I need to continue to work on relaxing my mind in these intense races. I finished in 38th place.
The middle was much better for me, and despite a brain fade on an obviously risky leg in the middle of the course I was navigating well and had my navigation well ahead of my legs. I was strong on my compass, simplified the terrain well, and always knew what was coming next. I caught another runner at 17 in a very dense area of forest and left the control without any plan of what to do next and relied on my rough compass bearing. For some reason I wanted to run away from this other runner as fast as possible, which is always a bad idea. After running on a bad compass bearing I managed to relocate and limit my losses to about 1 minute and 20 seconds. I refocused and navigated ok with only a few hesitations for the rest of the race but my mind was noticeably wondering and the thoughts of disappointment were hard to ignore. The courses will be online here some time soon.
My legs were quite tired from the previous days of racing and analysis shows that I was a bit off the pace. I finished in 31st which is an ok result but what I was more interested in was simply having a clean run. Tomorrow I will run first leg for our men’s relay team with Matt and Jourdan.
