|
|
14.Oct.2006 |
Austrian Night Championship
|
|
The Race:
This years Austrian Night Championship took place in the surroundings of Graz. After two silver medals in the last two years and a pretty bad season my goal was to do a technical good job and hope for a very good result. Another motivation was that Matthias Müller was also taking part in the competition.
I felt very good at the first few controls and always was sure about my route and my position. I could also see that it worked well when I caught up Jan Zazgornik on the way from the eight to the ninth control.
A small disappointment happened only two controls later. On the way out of the tenth control I noticed that my headlamp would turn darker. I tried to switch to the smaller light but it didn’t pay off and suddenly my light was no light any more.
At that time I had two possibilities – one was simply going home from “somewhere” out in the forest and the other one was to simply follow Jan on the rest of the race. I decided for the second one and went on behind him. It was a really big challenge to follow him through the forest without a light.
Already when I made my decision to follow I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t finish the race with a “valid” result in the result list. As there was no chance for me to have any influence on the two last thirds of the race I also didn’t feel “responsible” for the result at all. After approaching the finish with the third best time (second best Austrian) I was immediately taken for an interview by the speaker where he asked me about my possible third silver in a row and my reply was simple: “Definitely not this year”.
I let myself disqualify because I don’t want to have a medal “hanging around” at home for that I’m not taking the “main” responsibility. I don’t race for medals; I race for the challenge to do a perfect race – even if I know that no race will ever be perfect. I would never see such a “success” or medal as a real success. Now I know that I was leading the competition with about 45 seconds at the moment when my light went dark – to me that’s worth more than a silver medal I can’t be proud of.
It was pretty strange to me that many other runners didn’t understand that at all…
Night Course
Night Route
Splits/Split Analyzer
|
|
|
|
Posted on: 17.10.2006 10:33
Last edit: 17.10.2006 10:33 |
|
|
|
