The first leg was a long route choice leg and I picked the straight hilly route. This soon told me that my legs weren’t really up to the job today. This wasn’t helped by a series of careless mistakes. About half way round I decided that I couldn’t run slowly AND lose time to errors and for the remainder of the course I was able to concentrate sufficiently not make any major blunders.
I was pretty surprised to find myself in first place when I finished but this wasn’t to last long. Petr had knocked nearly seven minutes off my time. On another day things might have been different but by the time the final results went up I’d slipped down to fifth place.
(As you can see from the photo – the assembly field was pretty disgusting and was a fair reflection of most of the forest!)