First Race of the Season

May 5, 2010 Sprint in Riverdale

We had our first local event of the year last night on the Riverdale map. It was beautiful sunny weather with a good turn out. I was really excited to see many of the kids from the Junior Program there.

Results

The Course

We were treated to a nice evening by Nesta and her group of volunteers. As you can see from the map above, the Advanced Course had some nice direction changes. It would have been very easy to leave the control in the wrong direction if I hadn’t oriented and refolded my map each time.  There were also a variety of leg lengths to challenge us with some short technical legs immediately after the longer legs. I got caught out on #3 where I didn’t use the simple trail running on the way to #2 effectively enough. I thought there was a nice route choice problem to #8 as well. I actually had to come to a complete stop to look at this leg more closely. I would have preferred a little less straight running on legs 10-14. It would have been nice to have a bit of route choice there and not so many dog legs.

My Race

It was a pretty good race for me. I think I executed my competition plan quite well. Now that I have finished the race, I can look at what I did in more detail. It is always good to analyze what you did so that you can confirm what you did well (remember to be positive!) and figure out what you need to work on for next time. For an example of race analysis, you can check out Dahria’s race analysis from last year for her HPP Application. Here is my completed Competition Plan/Race Analysis sheet from yesterday’s race.

May5CompPlan_RaceAnal_Brent

Your Race

You should look at your own race. Even drawing your route on your map can be very enlightening. Taking it one step further by doing a bit of a race analysis will help you improve even more quickly and can be very motivating as well. In case you didn’t fill one in earlier, the Competition Plan/Race Analysis form is on this page.

The Next Step

You may not have noticed before but the Competition Plan/Race Analysis form actually has a second page. The second page has columns to allow you to slot in the various statistics from your races. This way you can notice if you have any trends from race to race. As an example, you may notice that you are always making one large error which might tell you that you need to work on relocating more quickly. I hope you will be inspired as you record your improvements from race to race.