Ås by Night & Fog Cup - Garmin 620 test (2013-12-10)

One of my slowest races ever, more than 15 min/km!

The conditions were pretty bad, 1-2 degrees C and about 10-15 cm of fresh extremely wet snow, Add in an extremely hilly course, lots and lots of windfall and this is what you get! :-)

The tracking is the combination of two GPS watches: The old 405cx is shown as a pure red line while the new 620 is multicolored. The two units mostly agree within 10-15 m, but there are some exceptions, like in the dense wet forest to and from #4, where the old watch is significantly more consistent than the new. :-(

The orienteering was OK to the first three controls, halfway to #4 I started to orienteer to the nearest control, i.e. #5! I realized this after a minute but decided to go on and use this detour to make it easier to locate it coming back from #4.

The first real mistake was on control #6 where I ran extremely well until 10 m away from the control, but when I didn't see it underneath the cliff I thought I was too high and started downhill! When I realized my error and climbed back up I had lost two minutes, so I ran as fast as I could downhill towards the next.

Nr 7 was the big mistake, I lost map contact after leaving the reentrant 70 m NE of the control, then searched for 4 minutes.

I took the safe option to #8, retracing some of the paths I had used to the first control.

At this point I was together with a competitor who had started before me, so instead of using my initial route choice (back up along the paths) I decided to run down to the road and around the hill. It seems from the split times that this was 30-45 sec slower.

I was very careful downhill to the finish, I didn't want to risk any falls/injuries!

I ended up 10 min(!) behind the winner but still in 2nd (out of 14) place. :-)

PS. The 620 HRM-Run monitor shows very clearly all the places I had to walk/climb, because the foot/ground contact time increases sharply. It was somewhat annoying halfway to #1 when the watch suddenly started to vibrate and told me that my "heart rate had recovered nicely", i.e. the uphill path run followed by a careful compass course down to the control was interpreted as a hill interval!