Saturday, June 12, 2010

Yukon Champs!!

Well, here in the great place called the Yukon, orienteering is in full swing. We have been training on Mondays and Fridays with training or a meet every Wednesday. The last two Wednesdays have been the sprint and the middle of the Yukon Championships and the turnouts were amazing!! Most of the people were running novice or intermediate but its great that the community is coming out to participate in our events. I was running the long advanced course for both the sprint and the middle but my sprint was a lot better! The sprint was held as a fund raiser for the junior program here in the Yukon so everyone helped plan courses and dealt with registration and such. The long advanced course was a pretty long sprint at 3.1km and was held around the Mt Macintyre ski trails. It was in general a forested sprint with minimal climb.
My race started out smoothly with a couple of really smooth fast controls. I was focusing on thinking ahead and being smooth through the controls. The next couple of legs were longer and I had to think more about route choice. My choice was pretty good I think but I was tentative and stopped short of the control and had to look at my map for probably about 10-20 secs to make sure I was where I thought I was. These are the kind of mistakes that I would like to eliminate in my races, I need to be more confident. The rest of the course I was technically sound as the course weaved through a residential area and back into the forest but I was not going very fast, my decisions were not as fast as I would have liked them to be near the end of the race.
The next Wednesday was the middle distance for Yukon Champs, it was held on the Macpherson map North of town. The middle was only 100m longer than the sprint but with quite a lot of climb 160m! The course was really well set with many challenging controls. My race was less than stellar but I think I learned a lot from this course. My plan was to be really technically sound and to try to pick up the pace a bit. The problem I ran into on this course was that I was too safe with my routes. I didn't take enough risk so in consequence even though I wasn't going really slow I took longer. An example is the first control which was in a depression beside a really distinct hill with a clearing on one side. The hill was a perfect attack point coming up from a trail junction. What I decided to do was run farther on the trail and come in along a ridge. This route choice worked but it was slower and longer. During this race I was thinking but not in the right ways..
Many people did have good races though, and I would like to thank the organizers for there efforts and I am looking forward to the long next Wednesday and all the other orienteering thats going to happen this summer!!
I will hopefully be able to put some maps up on this post soon!!

1 comment:

  1. Great to hear you are getting out in the forest regularly for training and racing. That's the way to improve! Orienteering in Whitehorse is so nice. Hope to be up there next summer.

    ReplyDelete