Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Friday, December 31, 2004 E is for Embarrassing ErrorI made an error when I was training today. Take a look at the map below. It shows three controls on a control picking course I was running. I designed the course a year or so ago. The locations were unmarked -- no flags, no tapes.Control 12 is on the spur (actually it is in the stream, but on the way to 12 I decided I'd run up the spur instead of the bottom of the stream). 13 is a reentrant and 14 is a tree in the open. To 12 I rounded the big hill, staying right of the straight line. As I rounded the big hill I looked ahead and spotted the spur from a good 150 meters away. Nothing to it, just push up the hill. Then comes the error. When I got to 12, I looked at the map and read the leg from 13 to 14. Simple. Follow the hillside, cross a reentrant, pop up to the clearing and look for the tree. Off I ran. Except I wasn't at 13. I was at 12. So I'm cruising along the hillside and wondering, "shouldn't I be able to see the clearing ahead of me." I came to the reentrant (the one that 13 is in), expecting it to look like the reentrant between 13 and 14. It didn't look right at all. When things don't look right at all you can just keep going, or you can stop. I tend to stop. I stopped. No way the reentrant I was in (the one that 13 is in) was the one I'd expected. What?! I looked at the map again and saw what had happened. Dumb. At least I didn't waste much time (since I was standing at 13!). I was absolutely alone in the forest. It was just practice. It wasn't a race. But I was embarrassed to have done something so stupid. posted by Michael | 5:14 PM 
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