Oslo City Cup 1 (11/04/2023)

Due to the rain forecast I tried to run with a single contact lens instead of glasses, but with the wrong strength: This meant that I had to stand almost still to be able to read small details, and it caused immediate problems when I failed to find the start triangle and ran past the opening in the fence to #1 while looking for it. Lost ~25-30 sec here.

#2 was a pretty even left/right choice so I simply kept going past #1.

With normal (much drier and no snow) conditions, the best route to #3 would have been to go between the buildings and diagonally over the lawn, but today the paved path was much faster.

OK route to #4, going right was marginally shorter but much more down and up again.

No route choices to ¤5 or #6, just pure running (which I did very slowly)

Going left to #7 was clearly better since that let me do parts of the climb on paved surfaces.

Easy routes to #8 & #9.

Up to #10 I was getting really tired, to the point where I stopped reading the map and cut right between the wrong set of buildings. Here I punched the wrong control, but fortunately suspected something was wrong and returned to it, verified that it had the wrong code before figuring out where I was. I lost nearly a minute here! On this control Richard Z-G overtook me by 1:30, but then he stayed more or less behind until the final run-in.

No route choices to 11-14.

I found the optimal route to #15: Left through the parking garage, over the bridge and then through the fence opening to the left again.

#16 was another 50/50 route choice, so taking the left option was clearly better since it allowed me to keep running past the controls.

Only one good route to #17, then I did OK on the rest except #22 where it was about 30m shorter to go right.