Score
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Best
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Ski hard and your hands shake. Three laps, five shots each — every second you gain on the trail you pay for at the range, and every miss costs five.
Hold the button to push on the ski leg and let go to glide. Pushing is faster but drives your pulse up and drains your legs; gliding lets both recover. Run out of legs and your pulse climbs even higher for the same effort.
At the range the button becomes the trigger. Your aim drifts in a slow figure of eight whose size is set by your pulse: calm and the crosshair barely leaves the target, blown and it swings far outside. The crosshair turns green whenever it is on target — that is your moment.
You get five shots and seven seconds per range, with a short reload between shots, so a high pulse costs you twice: fewer chances per second, and any shot you cannot take in time counts as a miss. Standing still lowers your pulse, but the range clock and your race clock both keep running.
Three laps, fifteen shots. Your time is the clock plus five seconds for every miss, and lower is better.
The first thing to internalise is that the trail and the range are one system, not two. A lap skied flat out arrives at the range near two hundred beats, where the crosshair swings so wide that it crosses the target only about once every two and a half seconds. You saved a second and a half on the snow and handed back four waiting for the aim to come around. The fastest runs are not the ones with the fastest laps.
Use the glide. Letting go of the button for the last stretch before the range costs you very little distance but drops your pulse before you even arrive, and it refills your legs so the next lap does not start from empty. Arriving calm is worth more than arriving early, because the pulse falls slowly once you are standing still — roughly a five second time constant, which is most of your seven second range clock.
At the range, resist the urge to fire the moment the crosshair goes green if it is sweeping fast. A shot at the edge of the target while the aim is moving quickly is the one that misses. Wait for a pass where the crosshair drifts across the middle rather than clipping the rim; at a moderate pulse those come often enough that one skipped chance costs you well under a second, while a miss costs five.
Watch the legs bar, not just the pulse. Running the legs to zero triggers an extra penalty on your heart rate, so the third lap of a race where you emptied yourself on the first two is brutal: you ski slower and shoot worse at the same time. Spend the legs where they buy the most, which is usually the opening of a lap, and coast the approach to every range.