Run ((model event)) 46:00 [3] *** 5.0 km (9:12 / km) +200m 7:40 / km
spiked:13/16c
WMOC model event at Le Prevoux. This is supposed to be the model event which represents the 'hard Jura' (long qualifier 2 and final), as opposed to the 'fas Jura' (qualifier 1). It was still easier going, I think, than France (to some extent this was expected because of the higher altitude). Not as many sinkholes as there were in France, but lots of small features in sometimes vague country. As always, model event day is about seeing what the map interpretations are like, and my scoreboard is:
Green/yellow: excellent, and unusually for central Europe, mapped to summer standard so if it's yellow it really is yellow, not yellow with medium green stripe.
Tracks: some of them are small, and a lot of them are muddy. Wouldn't count on seeing them when crossing - old walls are better for that.
Brown dots: tiny!
Black dots: also very hard to see at times - most of the boulders aren't very big and a lot are covered with moss.
The one concern of the day is that the ground is soft and my Achilles wasn't particularly comfortable pushing uphill on it. Hopefully that's a function of most of the climbing being early on a day when the first few controls were the warm-up.
The racing starts tomorrow: sprint qualifying in the evening, then the final the following day. The town where qualifying is looks pretty bland and I suspect it will largely be a running race, which would be a worry if qualifying in M35 was as brutal as it is in say, M60 (six heats, 14 qualifiers from each).
The public transport system is, unsurprisingly, working pretty well. I'm staying in Biel because I left it too late to get anything reasonable in La Chaux-de-Fonds or Neuchatel, but the way the program has turned out, apart from not having a sprint day at "home", it's almost as convenient a location as either of those two.