WMOC H60A Long Final (2018-07-13)

The penalty for doing a bad forest qualification is that even with a good run in the Middle B final which allowed me to run the A final here, I had to start very early and that was a clear disadvantage anywhere I had to pass denser vegetation. I did not have the speed of any of the top runners but I could have been a bit closer:

I'm happy with my route and execution to #1, but I had to break a bit of trail in a few places, particularly the last 200 m.

#2 is a much more obvious example of the advantage of a late start: I actually ran this leg quite well but got stuck in chest-high vegetation into the control and used more than twice as long as Rolf Lund. Winsplits thinks I missed 1:16 here!

In the more open terrain to #3, 4 & 5 I was much closer to the speed of Sixten Westlund and Rolf Lund, the two fastest runners today.

I think my route to #6 was OK as well, but here I had a similar issue to #2 in the dense vegetation into the control.

#7 is where my concentration failed, I was just going to the path bend, then the ride to the end and straight down to the control, right? In reality the ride was quite indistinct and I ended up going down into the wrong valley, and when I realized this there was a number of unmapped windfalls which made it hard to get back to the control. I lost about 2:30 here.:-(

#8 was OK and up to #9 I had my best split of the race, even with some vegetation to cross.

The route to #10 was OK and so was #11 but here I was slowed down significantly by tall grass on the area around the indistinct marsh.

#12 was my second miss of the day, I did not notice the ditch underneath the control circle and thought I ran along the one pointing to the control. Lost 20-30 s.

I'm quite happy with all the remaining controls but I'm sure I lost some more vegetation time on both #15 and #16.

So, with a perfect race I would still have been 5 minutes behind Sixten, this could maybe have been halved with a late start but the podium was never in reach.

I should have listened to my son and done more speed work over the winter and spring! :-)