Ski-o world champs long distance. I guess the good news is that I didn't break any skis.
Interval starts today, which is fairly unusual for a long, they're usually mass starts. Also it was 1:15, we've usually been on 1:12.5 for the last couple years. First part was up in very sparse trees on the top of a 'mountain', which was pretty awesome just because it was awesome up there. Long legs on crazy narrow trail descents. The snow was really soft though, despite how many times they've told us they've been driving the tracks for two months. Uphills were really tough, there were edges on the sides of the trails and the trail surface wasn't solid enough to pole hard in most places.
So the fun part, got to #3, with a real short downhill leg to 4. Two crazy drops in a row, made the first, hit soft snow at the bottom of the second and dug in a ski and bit it. Broke a pole, stabbed myself a bit with the ends of the pole, bent the arm of the map holder sideways, broke the plastic base sheet of the map holder in half (stabbed myself a bit with the pointy ends of that), tore the map into a couple pieces, and bent the toe bar on my boot. It was a pretty sweet fall.
I dug around in the snow for map chunks for a while (they all got speared down a foot or two when the map holder went in). Found all the parts with controls, couldn't find a chunk of the center I had to ski through to get back but I figured I could wing it on that part. It was another three controls until the equipment drop, and I figured skiing over there for a new pole then coming back would be just as slow as doing the next three with one pole, so I just kept going. In hindsight there's a pretty obvious route 4-5 that goes through the equipment drop, but I probably hit my head at the same time so I didn't see it at all.
The new pole had medium sized baskets, so that sucked on the soft trails, but most of my problem was the busted map holder plastic. Only about 1/2 of the bottom sheet was still attached, though I kept the other half and snapped it on because it sortof held the map in place. Except when I was going fast or it was windy, the the snapped on piece flipped up and stabbed me in the face. Good times.
All told the navigation was pretty uneventful, no mistakes that were worth worrying about. I wasn't moving too fast when I had the one pole, and took easy safe routes for the rest because I was a little sketched out and fairly sore, and couldn't double pole worth anything on the uphills. I was quite successful at generalizing the mazes into contours and catching features, and took lots of routes that were 'take downhills' or 'take horizontals' or 'go that wayish' until a target.
edit: seriously I was just
skiing along and I don't know what happened to it.