Austrian Middle & Team Championships

Middle Distance Championships

Well, my expectations for the race weren’t pretty high because I’m fighting headaches since the Military World Champs in Croatia and they still didn’t leave me so far. The goal was simple, stay focused as much as possible and take smart and save routes between the controls.
There was a “minor” problem at the start for me. On the start list my club got into the bag with all the other stuff for the race my start time was listened with twenty-six but on contrary the start time on the list of the officials at the start war twenty-four. As I don’t like waiting in the crowd in front of the start I was suddenly a little less than two minutes late at the start and rushed through some boxes. Just some blinks of an eye before the actual start I was ready for the race.
My performance during the race was quite ok compared to many races of this year. I could have gone more straight on the 11th control, should have used the paths more on the 14th control and didn’t take enough time to run the right valley on the 23rd control.
Well even without mistakes I couldn’t have got into the fight for the medals which were taken by Bindi (who won his first individual title with the power of the dark side! J), Kerschi got second and Klaus Schgaguler took the bronze medal. I ended up in 6th place some seconds more than four minutes behind the winner.

Middle Course Middle Route Splits/Split Analyzer

Team Championships

Already during the week before these competitions we were discussing possible line-ups in order to maximize our success on Sunday. We thought about splitting up Bindi, Kerschi, Markus and me into two close to similar strong teams and add one of the a little less strong runners. In the end another decision was made and the three fastest runner of the Middle Distance formed the first team and Markus, his brother Thomas and Gusti Benedek were the second team.
There was just a net of controls with four group-controls where we had to be as a whole group at the same time. The fact that a mass start was used for all teams made the competition even more interesting. In order not to rush anything right at the beginning we took our time for our decisions and our plans for the order of controls and the changes of the runners were already finished before we arrived at the first group-control. After some counting of climb and measuring of distances our sequence proved to be good but in between the second and the third control there’s some potential left - but more on that a bit later.
On my first few controls I wasn’t really well warmed up any more and also didn’t take enough time to read the map because I thought that I already knew the legs by heart. Some mistakes close to the controls were the consequences but the time loss was within the limits. The second and third part went very well. It was especially good that I had a look at all of the “interesting” controls in the rocky area before I attacked them with the SI-stick on my finger. Our main opponent, the team of the ASKÖ Henndorf with Felix Breitschädel took a completely different approach as their running order and they were all the time ahead of us at the first three group-controls. But when Kerschi and I were waiting at the last group-control for Bindi, we finally found out that there was still one control on their list (121) that we had already taken before. We enjoyed our in run into the finish together – winning relays and team competitions is always great, especially with my “old” friends like Kerschi, Bindi and Markus are.
The team of ASKÖ Henndorf got second and our second team got third even if there was a protest claiming that they weren’t visiting one of the group controls together. As far as I know it was a discussion about one-digit-meters but I haven’s seen it myself so I can’t really comment about it. As far as I know there’s still a protest going on at a higher level authority but I haven’t heard of any new decision so far.
Today I took the time and measured some distances and counted climbs in order to find out the “perfect” order of attacking the control. Basically our decisions proofed to be very good the only real improvement would have been to avoid “killing” about 50 meters of climb again right before the third group control and change the order from 51-133-106-57-134 to 51-57-133-106-134. This would mean the saving the 50 meters climbing at the expense of about 250m running which should be reasonable.

Team Course Team Route Splits/Split Analyzer

Posted on: 25.09.2007 15:02
Last edit: 25.09.2007 15:02

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