Pinseløpet dag 1 (2018-05-19)

Felt bad from the start today but I managed to hold everything together for the first three controls:

Took the logged area ride instead of the road towards #1, this was probably a mistake but I was just 7 seconds behind Nils Hæstad (who won as usual). Since I had realized this mistake while doing it I ran very hard to #2, won that split clearly and took over the lead in the race.

I kept the lead while climbing up the steep hills to #3 but lost 4 seconds to Nils who was just 2 sec behind me at this point.

Just after I crossed the road towards #4 (on a direct bearing for the control at this point) I stumbled and snapped my hands forward to catch myself, but without actually hitting the hillside in front of me. Shortly after I realized that my brand new Silva compass which was replaced last weekend after the retaining ring fell off, had now failed in exactly the same manner! I carefully grabbed the plate and lose compass center to keep the parts until I got back to the finish, but this event obviously caused me to drop the script. :-(

I lost 2.5 minutes exactly to Nils here, and then to add insult to injury I made a similar mistake inside the ring on #5, dropping another 2+ minutes so that I met Nils (who had started 4 min after me) while still trying to find the control.

At this point I was very disappointed and was almost glad to take a break in the middle of the hillside to #6 in order to tie a shoelace that was flapping around. Nils was almost half a minute faster than everyone else up this hill!

I knew that most of the climb was done now so I tried to restart my race here and ran very nicely to #7, but the decision to take the safe path route to #8 was a bad mistake. Including the 15-20 sec wobble inside the ring this route cost me another minute compared to Nils.

The last two controls were pure downhill, I had good flow and won both of them but still ended up 6:18 after Nils. Without the compass issue he would almost certainly still have beat me due to much stronger uphill running, but I could have managed a second place.