Notes
Green-Yellow double. I caught the first edges of the sun rise, which was really pretty.
My watch had 8.27 and we're pretty confident that the yellow loop was not actually 5.5. The green loop is not bad, but it's very rhythm-based, which is tricky at night. The yellow loop is so much nicer since you can get a solid back and forth. As a point of comparison - 33:55 for the green loop (3.3) and 50:12 for the yellow (5.5). I was solidly a minute a mile faster on the yellow loop after running the green.
Recap of Green:
I screwed up the first point of the green trail. The person ahead of me went the wrong way and I just kept chasing. Happily, it was only about 10 seconds, but I definitely confused the volunteers - sorry! After that, I was just trying to focus on rhythm and not missing too much - that didn't really work, but I did keep the rubber side down most of the time. I think I fell once on this loop, but not hard or with any consequences. With that said, this was definitely quite slow - 39/205, which is comfortably the worst of the four loops.
Recap of Yellow:
I just could not focus on this loop - at least two of the three falls were because I wasn't dialed into the trail. I was definitely feeling the lack of sleep at this point, which was a tactical error. I also was feeling more than a little hungry for something warm, which was not helping the situation. Tactical, since I had the option to sleep for a bit, but couldn't get chilled out enough to sleep with everything going on and people moving around. As a one-off, I'm okay with basically not sleeping much more than a nap with excess caffeine, but I should work on that for future races. That said, this seemed to turn out okay - this was pretty solid, 18/205 and comfortably in the right pace band.
Additional note - yellow is 100% short of 5.5. If I had to guess, it's probably in the 5-5.2 range, even if my watch claimed under 5 (IIRC).
Gear was the same as the first loop, which meant everything was a little too damp to get really dry and warm. That was also not a perfect idea - as a counterpoint, it worked pretty well for me.