ski-o! race 58:00 [4] **** 11.0 km (5:16 / km) +350m 4:33 / km
spiked:11/18c shoes: 11 fischer rcr skio (110)
Yay blizzard. Had a late start, and it was snowing and windy like crazy during the warmup. Tried a bit with glasses and without, neither were very good, and in the end I wore the glasses for the race until they crapped up (maybe 15 mins) and then shoved them down my pants.
First three controls were ok, I took them slow and tried not to get frustrated with the poling on the little trails, which works as long as you stay calm about it. To 4 I contoured across above 1, then took the big trail all the way up above the houses. 5 wasn't so good. I cut southeast by a trail, jogged down and east, then there were a zillion bad cuts out to the snowmobile road so I never saw the real trail and was quickly past everything just above those houses. Took the horizontal trail over until I lost it, the forest on that end of the map is small trees and very open, so the wind and snow had drifted over everything until they were invisible. Trails that had been skied were better, but this was off any of the non-lost routes, so nobody had touched it. Off trail all the way to the control, since I could barely see even the two big trails I crossed. Not so fast on that one. 6 was even more of a disaster, plus I was going straight into the windy snowstorm this time. I think I went past 10, and then ended up on the figure-8 trail just south of the red hashed out of bounds area. I never saw the snowmobile roads at all. Took me a bit to figure out where those buildings had come from, but then I recognized the figure-8 field from the sprint yesterday, and headed down into the control from there.
7-10 were fine, all the trails were gone except for the straightest route which was skied in, so I mostly followed along on that one. Going to 11 I figured if I just recreated however I got to the figure-8 field from 6 I'd be most of the way there, so I did that, crossed the road, and hit it from above. 12 seemed like an easy run down the big trails, but all the big trails looked like little trails, except the ones that nobody had been on, those looked invisible. Got way more confused there than I should have, but eventually ended up on the big trail going into the map exchange, behind a really slow spanish woman who was snowplowing really slowly. Every time I thought I could squeeze past her to get around she would very slowly snowplow back in front of me. Then she skied really slowly through the men's map exchange lane (she was going to the finish). grr.
Map two, first control was easy, then out to the big trail and a long slog uphill and across the contour into the control. Went high to the next one up the big trail and then down through the field with the houses, the first left then cut through to the trail with the control. Down, west, down, east, down into the next one, which I did probably more carefully than I needed to but I didn't want to blow it and drop down too far somehow, since that was getting dangerously close to the part of the map where the trails were all gone. Down across the figure-8 field and the road, then carefully down the big trails, double counting all the junctions, since I knew I got totally mixed up last map and had to actually find a control in there somewhere this time. Straightish on the little stuff down to the map exchange control, where I almost whacked the telephone pole just before the last big trail, recovered from that and immediately went over a three foot drop into the ditch after it. My bad. Stayed on my feet with style worthy of the tv cameras that were hopefully not watching, and down to the control and over the bridge.
So not a great day. The weather wasn't so great, and you had to pay really close attention on the downhills to read the terrain since not all the mapped trails were obvious, and often times looked just like the random cuts people were making. So I blew it on the map reading concentration a few times, since I think I was spending so much effort and time reading the terrain looking for trails. This also took away from looking ahead where I was skiing, which made me blow through tight turns and crash more frequently. Also not looking ahead in the terrain as far probably didn't help the map reading since I wasn't matching up or anticipating junctions as far ahead at all.