Constance Bay Meet

The Constance Bay Meet in Ottawa was the first orienteering race of the season for me, so I guess season opener. If including Vancouver sprint camp, perhaps forest season opener. It was a very nice course, and area, although some of the route setting was a little bit messy in one place.

Overall thoughts on the race: navigation was fairly good, I had a couple hooks and mistakes but on the whole it was a fairly accurate race. Of course, I am out of shape after not running the past month, and so in the analysis most of my time lost will be due to lack of speed.

Two people were ahead of me, Eric Kemp, and Phil Turcanu, and so I will be comparing times and routes to theirs. Eric is great a forests races, placing in top 60 in the middle distance event at WOC (World Orienteering Championships) and Phil runs almost a sub 9:00 min 3km, so he’s really fast.

Right from the start it was fairly easy and I began getting accustomed to the terrain. I had a fairly straight line, but with a bit of a wrong direction having me land on the tip of the form line hill and change direction into the control. Eric on the other hand, was most likely moving quicker as he covered about the same distance as me, but was at the control first.

Michael (me) – [Blue] and Erik – [Red]

If we look at the split analysis, then we can see what the deciding factors of the race were for me. The 2 controls that stand out are 3 and 12, adding to a time loss of 1 min and 45 sec. On each leg respectively I was 62% and 44% back from the fastest time. Looking at the cumulative total, it looks like I started out 20% slower than the fastest times, and then ended up another 19% behind at the third control due to my mistake. This percent difference gradually decreased to around the 18th control, where it evened off at about 13% behind. The reason is because after my mistake I was running at about the same speed as the others, losing about 20s on average due to running speed. Thus the 2 min that I had lost at the 3rd and 12th were gradually diminished as the total time increased.

If we look at exactly what happened on those legs, then we can see what I had done wrong. For number 3, it is simple to see, I had misread the number that I was running to and ran to the wrong control, then realizing it there, I corrected myself. In this area of the course I thought the course setting could be said to be a little messy, because there was about 3 legs going through one control.

Leg 3

Leg 12

On the leg to 12, I can recall having a hard time getting through the green , feeling slow, and then hesitating on the path. The combination of these two factors most likely led to the 27s loss.

There were three legs that I won, the first being 4, because I had been to that control making my mistake to three, so that one doesn’t really count. The other two were 7 and 11, and below they are shown.

Leg 7

For leg 7, Eric’s and my route choices were almost exactly the same, we went fairly straight, the difference being about halfway I dropped more into the re-entrant, whilst he continued to climb 2 more contours up the hill, before dropping down into the control. The difference in climb that we took, was most likely the deciding factor for the leg.

Leg 11

Speaking to Eric after the race I found out that on this leg he had made a mistake, and so I don’t think that its a very fair comparison. Philip most likely also made a mistake on this leg that’s why my time turned out the fastest. If you look at the route choice though, you can see that I stayed in the white forest on the left, whilst Eric went into the green on the right where the visibility was worse. He missed the trail and then had no features to navigate off of, whilst my route had depressions all the way along to the control.

Another notable leg that I thought I would mention would be 10 which shows a reoccurring theme during the race. I had taken most of my routes straight, which usually is the fastest in white forest. This forest on the other hand was most likely a bit denser than the standard, therefore I was probably loosing time by cutting straight rather then taking the route around on paths. This is illustrated well in the example below. Of course another factor was most likely running speed, which I will be working on.

The next race is on next Sunday, so I’m looking forward to that, hopefully the terrain is more complicated then this one. This terrain was great, but a bit to simple for me to have a great performance.

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