Tuesday, July 11, 2017

TempO Qualifiers

The TempO qualification course consisted of two heats, each with five stations with five controls per station. Each country gets four entries. Our team consisted of current US Champion Richard Y. Ebright, Sharon Crawford, Clare Durand, and newcomer Matthew Pietro. Clare led the US results with a score of 464.5, followed closely by Richard, with a score of 496.5. Differing heats put Clare in 29th place and Richard in 25th.


How did you feel about the course?
Matt: It was wonderful, set up great, and an awesome life experience being in Lithuania and seeing lots of different adaptive and non-adaptive athletes.
Richard: It went pretty well, not quite well enough for the finals. Was hoping for a little faster, but pretty happy about 23 out of 25 correct.
Sharon: I only missed five of the 25 and cleaned the last 14. Some of them were fairly easy if you didn't talk yourself out of it. Today I said let's go careful. You spend an extra 10 seconds versus losing 30 seconds for getting it wrong.
Clare: I liked it a lot. There was a good diversity of challenges. I think I did pretty well. It would be nice to work at getting faster, but mostly I felt that I was going the right speed for my current level - not wasting time, but not going so fast that I made mistakes. Overall happy with my performance, but a little bummed that it wasn't good enough to make the final.

What was your favorite station?
Richard:I liked most of station four. You were looking down at this island with a bunch of trees, trying to figure out which tree was which. I thought it was challenging, but very well set. I felt comfortable while I was going through it.
Matt: Fourth, with the lake. I got almost everything right. That was an easier set-up with a lot more distance between the controls.


Clare: I really liked station number five. I started looking at the flags and thinking they're all just in the middle of the grass. And then I realized there were all these trees - it's going to be a bunch of betweens. It was nice to have figured that out before I even flipped over a map. I thought that was an interesting and fun station.
Sharon: Station five was difficult. It was all trees - big trees, little trees - and somehow I worked my way through that. By then I was warmed up and I nailed it. Also the one across the lake.





What was your least favorite station?
Sharon: Station two was my downfall. It was way across the lake and I just couldn't quite see the distances between those ones on the far side.
Richard: Station two, I missed two of those controls. You were looking way off across a lake. I had a little trouble seeing what I was trying to see off in the distance. Felt pretty uncomfortable and wasted a lot of time. That one's where I really bit it.
Clare:  By far the most difficult and frustrating was station two, because it had flags pretty far in the distance and with enough vegetation that it was obscuring some of the features. It made it difficult to tell exactly what the flags were on or not. I missed one of those far ones for that reason. You're looking at it and thinking it's in approximately the right position, but there's vegetation there, so does that mean it's not on the pavement, or is it close enough and that's just what you are expected to discern from this distance.
Matt: I messed up on the first station. I've never done one with water in front of controls before and that threw me off a little bit.



Anything you want to add?
Sharon: It was a lot of fun, it really was. If we could do this a lot more, like every weekend, I would be a lot better. Clare did well, she's our Champion today.
Clare: It's nice to have these new guys who have real enthusiasm for what they're doing here. It's been really fun seeing Matthew go out and how excited he and Christ and Curtis are about everything. Also excited that after a few years of trying to improve, I still haven't made a final, but in the results, I'm in the company of people who have. It's inspiring me for the future that there is a goal that may be in reach.
Richard: it's always an honor to be at the World Championships. Today could have gone better, but pretty happy with how I did and looking forward to the PreO competitions for the rest of the week.
Matt: Thank you for having me out here!

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