Peak-2-Peak

Format: Point-to-Point, Trail
Terrain: Forest, deep valleys, meadow, road, trail
Weather: Drizzle/Rain, 5°

I thought I'd get all my lost-iness out of the way by making the wrong turn on the highway in Hamilton and forcing my carpool mates to run out their phones trying to guide me across the city and back to the race start. That mostly worked. But it's not an efficient strategy.

This was the warm-up race for the Raid the Hammer, and I raced it with my teammate WP. The orienteering was actually quite challenging, which is good, because I don't expect the Raid navigation to be nearly as hard, so this was a good way to overcompensate and be better-prepared. It was a blustery cold and wet day, so any time spent moving slowly and thinking about the course kind of sucked a lot.

AP Route, Garmin Track

We spent a short time marking my map, and while that really helps if you do a good job, maybe committing to certain route choices hastily isn't the best idea. To get to control 1, we ran around the bottom of a hill on a road, even though I saw another racer duck into the bush earlier - I realized that it wasn't a straight climb on the near side, but a bit of a valley; decided to press on anyway, but the other way was much faster. For control 2, I took us down the hill along a bad line because there was a clear path, so then we had to go up a trail to make sure we knew how far along we were.

Then we had a long run on a piece of the Bruce Trail (yay! I love seeing those white blazes!) and easily found 3. The straight route to 4 looked pretty green on the map, but we agreed we'd see how it is in reality and decide then if we should take a trail around. We ended up finding a bit of a clear path through sumac bushes, but when we made it back out onto a trail close to 4, the vegetation was different than on the map, clearing later than it should have, so I overran my attack point; thankfully there were some characteristic boulders where we ended up, so finding 4 was easy, just took too long. As an aside, this was probably the 3rd or so of many controls marked as "hilltop." The race was really "Peak-2-Peak-2-Peak-2-Peak-2-Peak-2-Peak"...

5 was easy orienteering, and 6 would have been the same, but we got caught up seeing 12 close to it, so detoured a bit before continuing to 6. We then moved to the third part of the map, which was a kind of crossed loop, and I did something silly - I started running straight for 11 instead of 7. Thankfully W was like, "huh??" and got us back on track, and the unplanned route was actually more direct and faster than going around like the other racers!

I have no idea what I did heading out to 8, but my line was way off, and we got quite close to an out-of-bounds private area. It was a little hard to tell how far along the private fence we were, and there had been some distracting racers yelling on a slight hill. Since we were looking for a hill (big surprise!), it was possible that that was it, although I thought the area we'd ended up in was too flat compared with that part of the map. We doubled way back to an obvious set of hills and houses and confirmed that we hadn't gone far enough in the first place.

9 was on the other side of a fairly deep stream valley, and once again I veered us off a straight line between the controls, crap. But that took us to a very obvious bridge and fork in the streams, so getting to 9 was quite easy. The only problem was that the control was set a good 100m too close to where it should have been, so when I tried to navigate among some hills to 10, I ended up in a different area than intended. I can read contour features very well, so I figured it out, but we really got slowed down here in what should have been a much faster section.

Next up was my favourite part: running on train tracks! I am terrified of trains. Maybe it made me run faster. 11 was fairly easy once we got back into the woods. We already knew where 12 was since we'd inadvertently visited it before, haha, and 13 was really fun to get to along a small sandy river bed. There was a cool crink in the river, and since I get very excited about funny contour features, that was a delight to run past. Don't judge me.

The way to 14 should have been a no-brainer since there was an open (although shrubby) field and a clear tree line. I have no idea how I turned us around, but we ended up on a trail that was perpendicular to the one we needed, and I clued in about 50m in when I checked the trail direction. 15 was fairly easy, and I kept a good line, but for some reason I chose to cut across a very brambly field to get to 16 instead of just taking a trail - I think I wanted to avoid climbing. Well we avoided that! I think I'm still picking the thorns out. Then we took the long Bruce Trail run back towards the start, and found 17 easily, although it was at the toppiest hilltop of them all.

Notes for the Raid:
- Use max time for map marking, and each map should be marked
- If we're lost-ish, get to a definite known point to re-navigate
- Teammate who is in charge of control descriptions / control numbers / other race leg instructions is awesome; food timing would also be fantastic during the long race
- I have a hard time holding a good line on a compass bearing, and I'd prefer one of my teammates to do this instead on the longer legs
- It would be great to have one teammate lead to a control and another teammate to have the bearing leading away from the control ready, so we can leave the control immediately; I'm bad at doing this in solo races
- Tow-line: normally I'd recommend it for equalization, but both WP and I are in no shape to move at a faster pace than what our broken legs allow; neither of us should push our legs beyond safe operating limits
- Gotta check in with team pace and stay together
- I know I get more nervous about my skills when others are counting on me to get it right

--Distance: 12.5km
--Duration: 2:28:53

Hey, even with a crappy time, it turns out we were 12th overall and 3rd women! This challenging course was not kind to a lot of the racers, many of whom ended up skipping controls just to finish. So I'm pretty happy that eventually our diligence and persistence paid off. Look out, Raiders - here come A Few Good Legs!