◪ race (ROGAINE) 8:40:50 [2] *** 55.0 km (9:28 / km) +1000m 8:41 / km
spiked:19/19c shoes: Salomon S-Lab Fellcross 2
Part one of WRC-13
Damage report: minor blisters, knee and back behaved well, I will live to run another day.
Race report: we planned two loops : 50 km West of start, and 58 km East, both counterclockwise.
Second loop had several adding points, were we could add from 3 to 12 km at a time in case terrain and course play easier than expected.
While terrain was as sexy as it gets in the beginning -
open fells with hard ground, not much rocks, and pine forest with excellent footing, we took advantage of that only first 3-4 hours, averaging 7 km per hour,
than luck of ultra endurance training, brought our speed to 6 km per hour, still great for ROGAINE. Spiked all the controls, navigation in daylight was easy and straightforward.
We came to camp after 8 hour and 40 min, quite in good shape, cleaned ourselves, changed into night (colder) gear, nailed ham and bacon sandwiches, hot tea!, waterproofed our feet one more time.
All that took 1 hour and 35 min, but it was worth it.
Temps at night dropped nicely, but I do not think it was down to 36F as night before. We were moving well, keeping ourselves plenty warm. Only one night control presented serious problem, being misplaced into unmapped reentrant, while only 75 m from the center of the circle, but not visible from right location, we checked this 400 long and 5 m deep reentrant twice all along it and were getting ready to leave, when one of the Finnish WO team members, checking parallel situation, alerted her teammate and us. I guess, luck was on our side, that night.
With fairly conservative approach to speed, we never hit a wall, and tugged along this course without loosing much time.