FLO - Bubba Goat (ghost event)

Canyoneros are wanting to have a strong 2013 year, so to keep training, we hit up legendary Gord Hunter.  He was extraordinarily nice enough to have come out of his way to Lake Louisa and given us the recent Bubba Goat maps to run.  Obviously, there would be no punches set out, but to see how accurate we were, he lent us his Garmin Forerunner 405 to confirm our route afterward.

Here are some pics of the 15 mile trail run...

the start

banana spiders are abundant in FL

getting a second map and some racing tips from Gord

very straight trees in this forest

we tried to avoid these seeds by going to CP7 in the shortest bushwhack possible; we were still attacked

biking through this deep sugar sand won't be any faster than trotting through it

one of many lakes at Lake Louisa

rummaging through a clean, open forest

Halfway through the race, we were in a barren world resembling West Texas.  It was scattered with cactus patties.  We caught a few in the foot, but that didn't stop us from running :)

orange groves

you can never avoid having to cut through these palmettos

With the GPS route recorded, Gord overlayed our route onto the race map, showing us missing only one control point, CP3.  You can also see that as we headed to CP4, we made a correction by going a little bit north on the trail to the highest point in elevation, before following the bearing to again.

The route colors indicate the the speeds we achieved through different types of terrain.  This is very interesting information, seeing how a bushwhack through the orange "rough open land" is roughly 1/3 the speed of running on the trails.  That means we can afford to run up to three times the distance to get to the same point, at the same time.  We will definitely use this information for future races.

We skipped CP5, as part of allowed race format, since it seemed like a lot of bushwhacking.  However, on post-race review, we could have followed the red route here to minimize bushwhacking, even with attacking CP6.

Here is our GPS route:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/254877186

Thanks Gord!  We definitely picked up new racing knowledge.