It took me a while to get this race report up, but here is a short write-up of a fantastic course. I was racing with my traditional Florida Xtreme 2 team, Erik, Jim, and Wanda. The event was held at a wonderful location - Princess Place Preserve in Flagler County.
Team had a 2 minute staggered start time, we started near the rear of the race at 8:06 on a 4 mile orienteering run to the boats. We quickly caught up with all the teams and ended up coming into the boats about 30 secons behind Primal Instinct. We moved very quickly through this orienteering in 40 minutes - the fastest time while picking up 5 CP's. For those who were with us at those CP's they were able to observe how we run tight to within a few hundred yards of the CP, and then move into a quick search spread - narrowing very rapidly on the CP without losing any real speed.
Once on the boats - we were with Primal up to CP9. I decided to pull the boats out of the water approximately 100 meters short of the control location. The CP was on a bluff - which was visible across the flood plain from the small creek we were in. This worked well as we only had about 50 meters across the flood plain before we found the CP. The CP led us on a bearing course through some incredibly thick trees. The controls were pretty easy to find, though the progress was slow because of the dense trees. Once we got to the last CP in the orienteering I decided to grab CP8 while we were on foot, since we had trail pretty much the entire distance to the CP - this was fast. We had no trouble dropping off the bluff to the river, snagging the CP and heading back to one of the orienteering CP's that would give us a good spot to head into the woods towards where we stashed the boats.
We paddled back and picked up CP7 along the route to CP6. A lot of teams had obviously headed to CP6 first as they were heading towards CP9. Instead of paddling to CP6 I decided to stash the boats along the long switchback near the US1 bridge and push out on foot to US1. We ran up US1 to County Road 205, found the control at the bridge and headed back at a pretty good run. I'm not sure if it saved us much time, since that would be based on how challenging the river paddle was. Once we got back to the boats it was a long paddle to the TA with one CP along the route. We tied our boats into a tow configuration and paddled hard.
When we reached the boat TA we were told there was a 2 person coed team in front of us. We ran back to the main TA and were told they had completely missed the orienteering at CP9. At this point we knew we were in the lead. We had completed the paddle and orienteering in 3:16. Air Force was 3:34 and Primal was 3:44 - we had a lead, but enough that one mistake wouldn't put us back with the pack.
On bike we did the out and back to CP11, and then to CP12 where we had another orieneering run. As we finished the orienteering we had a difficult time with the last CP - and found it the same time as Air Force and Florida Xtreme 1. Having Air Force on our backs gave us a little motivation to pick up the pace on the bike. This was challenging as we had a long distance with some long sandy trails. We were on the bikes for 2 hrs 57 minutes, which was slightly slower that Air Force (2:53) and slightly (very slightly) faster than Primal (3:00).
When we got back to the main TA - we were given a CP and a map and told we had a short (3-4 mile) orienteering to finish up the course. We had a solid hour left to complete this - so I had no worries with time required to clear the course. We took off at a pretty good run - especially considering we were pretty tired from 7 hours of moving at full speed. The orienteering proved to be pretty uneventful - and straighforward, and we finished, clearing the course with 15 minutes to spare.
I have to congratulate team Sheriff for an incredible course. The attention to detail at each CP was excellent. Each one required a different strategy, and the course really "mixed it up" and was a lot of fun.
Here is a track of the entire course - if you click on the details you can watch an animation of our route (including our 2 mistakes)
No comments:
Post a Comment