Geoform (31-08-2016)

Yet another nearly perfect race, except for one really stupid mistake:

1: Very good, found a nicely runnable route along and aroud the hills and reentrants.

2: Good flow, ran partway along a path which turned out to lead to a fixed control on the cliffs just north of the control circle.

3: Avoiding the marsh in the bottom of the first big valley meant that I ended up a bit furhter west than I intended but I just tried to use micro-routes that seemed most runnable.

4: A really tough leg! I was a little bit worried going into the control because the clue sheet said "south foot of knoll" but in reality it was placed due west.

5: Perfect?

6: Leaving #5 I refolded my map and started to orienteer from 6 to 7! As my track shows I discovered the error when I crossed the valley and nothing matched up any more.

7: OK except that the path shown across the marsh was totally invisible, I found the path again once I got up on the hill.

8: I decided to simplify this potentially very difficult control by starting from the path above, this turned out to be even better than I hoped because a new path lead almost all the way from the first valley crossing.

9: Choices, choices! I looked at this leg multiple times earlier on the course but could not find a good straight route so instead I ran twice as long along the available paths.

10: Easy on a readable 1:7500 map, just read all the important details and pick the correct narrow valley.

11: Another safe route, going directly across the steep hills can cost a lot of time here.

Finish: This was just a final control in the middle of the forest so I had to be careful here as well.

EDIT: The results seem to show that I had equal speed with the fastest Long course runners for the first 3 shared controls, and that I won every split except for #6 where I did that stupid mistake, leading to a 10+ min winning margin. (Torill Hallan was DSQ but her split for 6-7 was actually one second better than mine.)