I guess if I’m going to post the good results, I might as well post the bad ones. But this one does come with a caveat.

I again ran the Red course when I had 1st intended to run Green. Normally Red is the longest, and Green the 2nd longest. Every once in a while there is a Blue, which is a 1-2 Km longer than a red. Since there was again a blue, I decided to run red instead of green.

Anyway, after finishing 2nd on red last month, this month’s result was dissappointing to say the least. I was running well, but navigation was not quite right. I waisted a lot of time on control #5 and was about to give up, but decided to attack it from the lake, rather than the road trail intersection, which is probably what I should have done from the beginning. Once I found it, I was back on track, and got 6 and 7 easily. But 8 was another matter. After spending much too much time looking for it, another racer came up, and together we still could not find it. We finally decided to bail. He decided to go on to 9, 10, and 11, and I decided to just call it a day. I had already been out almost 2 hours and saw it was nearing 3 p.m., which is when the courses are normally cut off.

So I headed back in, splitting between 9 and 10, and going to the finish. I got there and told them I was a DNF due to #8, and they said no one had gotten it, and it had likely been taken by someone! So if I had actually gotten 9, 10 and 11, I would not have been a DNF. Based on the distance left for those controls, I probably would have come in around 2 hours and 20 minutes if all had gone ok.

So the moral of the story is, don’t spend too much time on one control when it is pretty obvious you are in the right spot, and always finish the course, even if you do bail on one.