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Occassional thoughts about orienteering


Wednesday, April 16, 2003

Map from Saturday at West Point

 

You can check out my map from the M21 course on Saturday at West Point. A few comments about my race:

On the way to three, I took a stick in the eye. It pushed my contact lens out of place. I stopped and poked around and discovered the lens folded over in the corner of my eye. It looked reasonably clean, so I put it back in. Ouch, there was some junk on the lens. A few blinks and I could see ok.

Some years ago I ran with one lens. It wasn't much of a problem. I'm nearsighted. I could adapt to using the eye with the lens to look in the terrain and the eye without the lens to read the map. But it took about 30-40 minutes to get used to.

I lucked in to seven. I was feeling a bit unsure when I saw a marker in a reentrant. My control was in a reentrant, so I went over and took a look. Sure enough, it was my control.

A control on the side of the hill a few hundred meters north of 12 would have been interesting. That sort of side-of-the-hill control can be really tough (what they call "skrÄ" orienteering in Sweden).

On the way to 13 I took a strange step and tweaked my left knee. From then on, I felt a bit uncomfortable running in the rocky terrain.

One of my goals for the last year has been to reach a point where I feel comfortable running in the woods. About a year ago I ran the short course in Pennsylvania and felt very anxious. Running in the forest was uncomfortable. I worried about every step I took. I'm mostly over that now. West Point was a good test. The terrain is rocky. If you're comfortable running down a rocky hillside at West Point, you're comfortable running just about anywhere. I was comfortable running about 80-90 percent of the time at West Point.

posted by Michael | 8:10 PM

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