Discussion: Be careful who you listen to

Well, skipping #4 might have been stupid from Alexei's perspective, but for another view on it see -
http://www.attackpoint.org/weeklyactivity.jsp/user...

For a more perfect analysis, you'd go back and run all the possible combinations, at race pace for all of it, under comparable conditions, then crunch the numbers, and maybe have one of those Eureka! moments. Or then again, you might look back and forth between the numbers and the map and figure, well, it depends...

No route is ever dumb just because someone else said it was. You get to make the final call.

Of course, I'd tend to be more convinced by the comments of the grandmaster...

On the map, I would say 4 looked ok, but not as good as 5, 6, or 18. I think it turned out to be much better than it looked, because of the massive density of mountain laurel between 4 and 5, which I think could be mostly avoided by skipping 4, though I didn't do that, so I'm not totally sure.

Going from 3 to 5 was pretty open running. I think skipping 4 was a lucky choice, but not necessarily a smart choice. If I could actually read a map well while running, I probably would have chosen 18 as a skip, but, I lucked out and just followed Jeff. Skipping 5 would have been another good choice.