The one with the route choice...

Well, back to Hungary and it's challenging tasks set for me. Monday dawned earlier and brighter than normal, as it was a working day for the masses in Eger and as our room had windows onto the road (I need to sleep with the windows open) we were rudely awoken by the sounds of traffic driving into Eger for work and school!

The training was again to be route choice and this time there were actually one or two routes choices. It was my plan to try one or two things out and my first goal was to get round with as little climb as possible - which worked to a degree, but the route choices were not always so good. And my second was to test out the thickets (as they were sending us through some).

S-1: Naja, climb to the first control :)
1-2: also good
2-3: dodging the thickets was OK
3-4: the long left (but flat) route - going straight would have been faster, but far more strenuous
4-5: Test of thicket (dark green) - took me 2 and a half minutes to do that 250m (downhill). An extremely interesting exercise as the green between 5 and 6 was completely the opposite - no problem to get through at all.
5-6: Did some extra climb, this route was substantially faster than the right or the left one, even though I was running through thicket.
6-7: No problem
7-8: Running on the steep hang was not possible, so I walked over on the contour. Map was not so good here either. Dropped a few meters and had to climb at the end.
8-9: My do or die NO Climb goal can to a standstill here. My idea to run over on the height had to be adjusted halfway thru the leg. However the approach to the control was good, and certainly better than going direct.
9-10: Here I made some silly mistakes. Lack of compass bearing to road cost me time as I thought I was on the main track, but it turned out to be only a side one. Then the map came into play. At mistake x6 the map was substantially inaccurate as although I took the right path, it was incorrectly drawn on the map. Bummer, this cost me 5 minutes, as I couldn't get through the private property. I can't blame it entirely on the map of course and if I had checked first before charging down the path, I would have noticed that the road had an additional bend on it not drawn on the map - this would have saved me much time, but there you go. As Thomas said to me afterwards, that's the way they do it in Hungary, so all in all a good lesson.
10-11: good
11-12: very good
12-13: Tried to stay on the height and climb at the end, but I should have climbed at x7 - this would have saved me heaps of time.
13-14: just a slog
14-F: jogging on the paths back to the car.

Ended up running 12,6 km with 630 climb in 116 minutes. The interesting part was that I only managed 140 climb until halfway through 8-9! Kerschi ended up with over 850 m I believe.

Lessons learned: Learn to ensure that you are where you think you are on the map (double checking). In Hungary there is going to be climb, even running to save climb I ended up with over 600 m so train those hills. Thickets are very differently mapped, so if it's really dark green, go around - not through!