Today's performance on Finnish Team's middle distance selection race wasn't exactly very good. I got lost on the first control (3min) and made another big mistake on "easy" 4th control (2.40min). Hovever, those mistakes didn't kill my racing humour and I enjoyed Mr. Salmi's excellent course till the end.
Lowering of the intensity is one key element for successful performances in these terrains, and I haven't yet found enough courage to take it easy enough at those crucial points. On the first control we had a new clearing and I got confused with that. When the map has changed like that, you really have to take it easy and I didn't do that well enough today. Well, I know that I surely can do that and tomorrow is the next chance to find the right rhythm. I will add the long distance map tomorrow as soon as possible and here you can see our course today. I think 33min would be a nice time:
In the long distance selection race I chose a safe tactic: do not run too fast ever and have a full contact with the map all the time. I didn't use a magnifying glass today, which forced me to walk in some places, but this was only a good thing. I didn't do mistakes over 30s and totally I could have made only about 3-4mins faster. On this course I consider it as a rather excellent performance:
Some more analysis from the selection races. You can see from these that the speed was high in the middle, but you achieve far more better result with the pussy-tactics I used on the long distance ;-):
