Discussion: crossing the line

I think it was Ross who once told me that crossing the line is generally inadvisable. It's certainly not a hard-and-fast rule, and many of your route choices today were on trails and probably correctly so, but I think in a few instances you could do better by choosing the right or the left rather than a combination of the two.

Specifically, for 1-2, I'd suspect it's a good bit faster to bash up through the green out of 1, take the small trail down to the paved road, and join up with your route later on rather than to go around to the right, only to come all the way back to the left. Also for 2-3, you leave the control to the left but then cross over the line to go to the right on the other side of the road. You could do better by either leaving 2 to the right or by just staying left the whole way.

Anyway, don't know if you were looking for route choice advice, but this stood out to me, so I thought I'd mention it.

On 1-2 I went same way as you for the first part, then avoided crossing the line by going right (north) around the small lake. I was motivated exactly by what bshields is suggesting - no crossing the line - but I'm not so sure it saved me anything. Splits should be interesting.

Yeah, I like the left route better than the right in this case, but it does take some mental fortitude to climb through green on a hot day.

I grew up with the same rule that you should not cross the line. The reason that I learned was that it many times added distance without you noticing it. It was demonstrated by putting a string as an "S" between two controls, and when you push the string onto one side of the line, you saw how much extra length you had just run. The added distance was that you had to travel all the way back to the line, before travelling away from it again.

I think the reason to cross the line between 1-2 is that going the path to the right (the fastest part for 2/3 of the leg as I saw it on the course) takes you back to the line no matter what. You are forced to get there. So in a sense, your route choice for the latter part of the leg is independent from the first part. For the second part, I think the left one is the faster.

The all the way left route choice is an interesting one. There is definitely a price to pay by punching through that green, but after that it should be very fast running. The path by the water was somewhat slow running as well since it was very rocky and twisty for a while.