Originally Posted by
chadteck
This motivated me to do a bit of reading. I always knew that in an out and back course any wind, no matter the direction, would lead to increased completion time, but never really put too much thought in to it. On a very basic level, one would intuitively think that the tailwind would make up for the headwind, but this is not true.
Intuitively, it is pretty clear that you spend more time going against the wind than with the wind for an out-and-back course, so you can't possibly make up the lost time.