Skjærgårdsløpet lørdag (11.05.2013)
Kategori: Competition
Kart/område: Holtekjæråsen
Arrangør: OTO
Distanse: 4.37 km
Tid: 33:29
Some times you run well and still get beaten, other times you win because everyone else ran even worse: This race was in the latter cathegory!

During the same event last year I made one of my best races of the season, today I started by noticing during warm up that the chest muscle I pulled in a fall on Thursday really didn't want to cooperate, making it impossible to get warm by running around. I pulled on more clothes, eventually running the race with long-slewed wool underneath my Nydalen race shirt.

It was still quite painful running towards nr 1, but that doesn't excuse my really bad execution:

Left the path too early, believing I had made it to the second right-hand bend, then got really confused by some unmapped marshes and small cliffs. When I got back to the path I continued to the proper attack point, then immediately lost my direction ending up far north of the control. According to the GPS I must have lost 3-3.5 min here, but it seems everyone had some problems so I was less than 2 min behind the fastest runner.

Starting towards #2 I kept on having directional problems, ending up with a big detour on the paths that must have cost 15-20 sec, but just 5 sec off the best split time.

#3 was reasonably OK, except that I never saw the saddle between the two knolls, so I had to turn left in order to locate the control. Another 10 sec?

On my way to #4 I saw Arve Glittum who had started a minute behind me, what I didn't see were any of the paths that the GPS insists I must have crossed going up the hill from the logged area! This resulted in other 20-30 sec mistake, but I was at least in front of Arve.

Ran fast towards 5, left the path in the proper spot and ran directly over a boulder field which had to be the one at the edge of the control circle, right? It turned out to be another, unmarked one located below the small cliff due west of the control, so I lost another 30+ sec here but Arve lost even more so I got a 15-second gap.

#6 was the first really good control, best split here.

OK to #7 as well.

I lost a few seconds to Arve on #8, mostly inside the control circle since I read the cliff on the map as facing east instead of west!

Another best split to 9.

Bad execution to 10, I should have followed the contours around the south end of the stream, then cut directly towards the control.

OK to 11, had caught up to Torgeir Strandhagen here, he ran really well towards this control.

Best split time to #12, at this point the split times show that I was in shared lead with Arve.

As I ran towards 13 I spotted Arve going up the hill too far south, realized that it might just be possible to beat him and started a finish sprint which lead to winning split times to the two final controls and a victory margin of just 6 seconds.

Pretty tight result when you consider that we both must have lost nearly 5 min. :-(
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