I played Boggle with my family this morning. Boggle is a word game where you try to find as many words as you can in a random 4x4 grid of letters, forwards, backwards, twisted around, etc. Its pretty good, not only is there the verbal/vocabulary component, there is a certain strategy of looking for anagrams, plurals, and mining certain sections of the grid.

I'm pretty decent at it, but the interesting thing is that it always takes me a couple of games to warm up. Before playing today, tho, I had never thought about the idea of warming up the brain for a mental task. But it seems obvious, the brain is a biophysical system just like leg muscles, (tho intelligent people can differ on the particulars and various philosophical questions).

Since I warm up my leg muscles and other physical systems before a race, perhaps I should warm up my brain also. Does it makes sense to run with a map during the warmup before a race? Find an old map of the venue and do route planning during warmup on the old course. Prime my neurons for reading a map? I think I'll try this before tomorrow's race.

When I lose time, it is usually in the first 4 controls; perhaps my brain is not warmed up. We'll see if it makes a difference.