Tactics

On Saturday I ran the Israeli Billygoat event, in which I last participated a couple of years ago. This time I qualified for the 50 and over age group, I was in a hurry (to save Roni from the kids), and I’m trying to work on my speed, so I opted for the Medium course. We had a mass start 8.6 km course in Ben-Shemen forest and could skip 3 controls.

Unlike on the Long course, I was expecting to be in one of the top places and to have some good competition, so I had all my tactics ready: don’t make mistakes at the beginning, read the map before you start running with the pack, choose the right controls to skip, prefer to skip towards the end of the course. All that went down the drain after 10 seconds… There were around 100 starters and I wanted to look at the map before I started, so as everyone pushed forward towards the starting line I kept back and a bit to the side. Then I opened the map, looked at it for 5 seconds, did a 180 degree turn and took off towards control 2.

my GPS wasn’t working 😦

A minute later I looked back and I was alone. From that moment onward I was orienteering by myself, though I was overtaken temporarily at controls 4-5 by some of the juniors who had skipped control 3 (and are much faster than me) and a couple of others who had skipped both 1 and 3. The eventual winner, 14 year old Peleg Metzafon, went past me between 11 and 13, and I finished half a minute behind him, with all the others a long way back. So much for tactics.

My analysis of the results and control skips is on Tableau Public. I skipped controls 1, 6 and 12, and maybe 3 was better than 1, but then I would have been stuck with the pack for the start and I probably ran better while alone. It didn’t feel like running a mass start event, but the course was still fun, fast (as it should be – I ran 7.5 min/km), and with enough skipping options to make it interesting. Thanks to Itay Manor for the planning.