So after all my big talk about Cyclo-cross, I missed the first race of the season on Saturday. But for good reason. We were offered the use of a cabin in Talkeetna for the weekend. I wasn’t going to turn that down for a one hour cyclo-cross race. Now I remember why it took me so long to try cyclo-cross: there is just too much other fun stuff to do as well! But no matter, I still managed to get in two races this week.
First, the Tuesday Night Running Races started this week. These races are huge, but very informal. The courses are always on very interesting trails, but are not always marked well. Its seems like every week a few people take a wrong turn. This week, it was me. I was attempting to pass someone, and completely missed a marker signaling a turn off the main trail. The two of us lead a group of 5-6 other runners on a minute-or-so detour before we got back on track. Oh well, it was fun, and I got a good workout. Results here.
Thursday was a GPS Orienteering event. Usually you don’t use a GPS for orienteering, but this event was a little different. Instead of punching controls hanging in the woods, when we reached a control location we just punched a waypoint into our GPS. At the finish, our routes were downloaded onto a computer to confirm our score. It was a neat new twist, but I missed the satisfaction of finding a control and punching it. Without the actual controls, there was no positive feedback during the event. It felt more like a guessing game. And with the margin of error of a GPS, it turns out that guessing once you were in the general area was usually a good strategy. It was fun, but I’m glad that the entire sport of Orienteering has not gone this direction. (Results aren’t up yet.)
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