Night Hawk Veteran Men 2 (2017-08-04)

Extremely fast terrain but partly quite dense vegetation: All the night legs for Men and Veteran Men started at the same time, so for the first 6-7 controls the key idea was to have a solid compass bearing and only follow those runners who ran the same way. The speed was very high, with the fastest men finishing the 6.9 km course in 32 min!

I lost the direction in new growth towards #8, realized that I had to bail out to the big track and recovered with a loss of about 2 min. At this point I met Sindre Langaas who was running the first leg for my team.

I lost a few seconds hesitating into #9 until Sindre confirmed that the control was located in a deep depression instead of a knoll spur.

#10 & 11 went very well but I should have made sure to locate the path/track junction halfway to #11, now I just estimated my position by the distance between them. I believe I was starting to feel the pace a lot at this point, after running at 93-94% of max heart rate for the first half of the course!

#12 cost me 60-90 sec due to stupidity: When we crossed the first road I should have followed my plan and gone west to the path in the light green corridor, taking this to the path bend opposite the control and allowing me to avoid all the green. I never spotted the indistinct path but knew I had to get closer to the railway track.

Taking the path out of #12 was pure lazyness, with the recent mistakes behind me I wanted to take a safe route but the last half into #13 was extremely difficult due to much denser new growth vegetation than indicated on the map.The visibility was just 1-2 meters many places.