okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Monday, April 30, 2007
Racing Hilary
I spent a lot of time yesterday racing Hillary. She started a couple of minutes ahead of me but made a mistake on the way to 2. From then on, I saw her off and on throughout the course. While I spent most of my time orienteering, I also had a few chances to observe Hillary's orienteering.
Hillary trains a lot. When you look at her log at Attackpoint, you see a lot of 16+ hour weeks. But she doesn't train for orienteering. I'm nearly certain that she runs a good bit faster than me out of the forest. But, in the forest, we kept similar paces (except for uphills when she was stronger than me).
I have no idea if Hillary was orienteering the way she usually would, but when I was paying attention to what she was doing, I was mostly impressed. A lot of people who are strong end up navigating poorly, making up for booms by running fast. These are the orienteers who pass you on the leg...twice. Hillary wasn't doing that. She seemed to be taking her time with the orienteering and being careful - stopping to read the map. That's good. It is a lot easier to reduce the amount of time spent on map reading than it is to reduce big booms.
Hillary's sprint qualifier shows that she's got the capacity to be one of the best US women ever. But her other WOC races are much more ordinary (and her sprint final map shows one of those races-best-forgotten). It'll be interesting to see how she goes forward.
After racing her head-to-head (and beating her), I still think she's got the capacity to be very good. I still think it'll be interesting to see how she goes forward.
