Birnbauer-Memorial-Run and 1. AC/ÖM Ultralong

It was a busy weekend, at least for us military-sportsmen. The annual Franz-Birnbauer-Memorial-Run was held the Saturday ago in Seebenstein. All athletes from the military sports centre are supposed to run it - like some kind of PR. At 15 ó clock the main competition started: 7,5 km (5 rounds á 1,5 km) and a few highmeters (maybe 8 - 10 per round?). Most of the course was on dirt roads followed by around 100m on grassland and ~250m on asphalt towards the end. Finally, Thomas Daniel (HLSZ 11 - Modern Penthatlon) won the race in 23:50, followed by Gernot "Kerschi" Kerschbaumer (HLSZ 11 - Orienteering) in 24:00 and Rathgeb Reinhard in 24:04 min. Kerschis girlfriend Patrizia won the ladies category in a time of 29:03 min.


Start of the 7,5 k

still good looking ;)

Approximately one hour later there was a relay-fun-event, where we "had to" start, too.

3 x 400m on grassland and a dirt path. It was short, fast and fun :D If it was clever? I don't know. Every member of a top-3-team got a small package including a beer, a chopping-board, a sausage and bread.

the HLSZ teams occupieng the podium :)

More Results

Then on Sunday the national competition season was opened by the 1st Austria Cup and Austrian Championships in Ultralong-distance for M/W 21E. The finish area was right on the town square of Purkersdorf, 5 km west of Vienna. It should be one of the most exhausting ultralong distances since a long time. Most of the elite runners did not run the elite-course (due to different reasons, which I don't want to explain here): Wolfi and Bindi were running the M21 Short (they wanted to do a normal, "short" O-Training; Wolfi won the competition ahead of Bindi), Tobi started in the M21S as well (he did some kind of start-simulation and quited after half an hour running), Kerschi started in M21E but didn't run the whole thing, Markus Lang didn't even start and I afflicted myself through the M21 Long course (in preparation for the long distance qualification for the austrian world champs team), but it was more a torture than a pleasure. I was sooo tired and had to walk several times, even if it was flat!! Anyway, I won the race with a comfortable winning margin of 20 min., although I lost much time at the 9th (~ 2 min.; lost direction, run too much down, interpreted the map wrong), the 22nd (~ 1:30 min.; don't know how I could lose so much time there, maybe I was simply dead??) and the 27th (~ 2 min. again; diffuse area, tired, not concentrated, ...). -> See map below!

Thomas Lang was the happy winner, with Pierre Kaltenbacher becoming 2nd and Georg Wittberger finishing 3rd. After almost three hours of running, Thomas won by a marginal gap of just 7 seconds!

Here's the map with my route and the split-times:

Results/Splits/Splitalyzer

Tiomila

The first important competition of this year is history and for us it was an exciting event like every year. It was nice to see that all of us were put into key-positions of our teams. Warti had the honor to run the first leg for OK Tyr 1, I was running the "långa natten" also for OK Tyr 1 and Wolfi was fighting for every place for Göteborg Majorna 2 on the last leg.
Warti had a very stable run and did exactly what a startrunner was supposed to do. Don't miss, hold the pace. He exchanged on a good 107th position 9 minutes after the absolute best, who were simply too fast to follow. It was very nice to see Kerschi winning the first leg with a clever route choice to the second last control!
The next runners of OK Tyr did a very good job and so I went out into the 18km course 2min behind Halden 1. I pushed really hard on the first meters and to the first control and it was really nice to see about 20 headlamps looking at me and my fellow runners from a small slope. It was Halden and many other runners looking for the first control. We didn't miss the first control and so we became a really big group of runners of about 30-40 people. The speed in the forest felt quite ok and my legs felt good but after some time Erik Axelson decided to push harder and the speed on the roads increased a lot. I was checking the map most of time and it happened some times that people asked me to which control we were going which was quite amusing :P I really enjoyed the atmosphere in this group where everybody seemed to watch out for another. Every 5 minutes somebody crashed down a stone wall with a loud scream and everybody was waiting for the green areas where the speed would decrease a bit. After about 12 kilometers following Haldens attacks on the paths and roads my legs started to feel pretty tired. More and more people couldn't hold the pace and dropped of. I turned around and didn't see any headlamp light behind me anymore. In front of me the runners just had the part of the map with the control codes in the hand and were just focused to hold the pace. At kilometer 15 we crossed a green area and I got stuck in some thorn bushes and crashed. When I got up again and tried to run as fast as I could out of the green I saw that the chain of headlamps was about 40 meters infront of me. It was going down a small hill with good runnability and I pushed really hard to close the gap, but so were the runners at the end of this group. After the next green I didn't see where they were going and I thought: "congratulations you idiot, you lost them..." I looked at the map and planed my way to the next control. There was one big route choice left and I decided to follow the power line because I didn't trust my tired brain anymore and chose the "easy" alternative. I think I lost quite a lot of time there, because the ground was pretty rough to run on. At the finish I had lost about 6-7 minutes on the big group before me which was quite disappointing because it would have given my teammates a much better chance to follow some good teams. I didn't miss a lot on my course but the lack of strenght on the last 3 kilometers was really annoying and did cost my team quite much time.
On the following legs our team had some technical problems and so we didn't pick any more positions and finished at 59th position. We were better than last year when we finished in position 70 and I hope we will manage to run in the top 50 next year.
Wolfi did a good job on the last leg and could leave a big group of runners behind him finishing at 57th place. I think we can be satisfied with our performances although the last kilometers of my course are still hurting in most parts of my body...;)
Wolfis map Tobis map
results

Nationalteam TC Hungary

Right the next day after our glorious 5000m race we drove to Betliar in Slovakia to start our trainingcamp with the elite nationa lteam as every year the week before Easter.
After we arrived some of us decided to do a little footing to loosen the legs before the following days full of orienteering.
Then, on sunday we started with a partner-O on the map of last years Hungarian Championships in October. This training was mainly to get used to the terrain and the maping.

In the late afternoon we drove to a very steep sprint map not far from our accomodation to do a not very difficult but fast sprint in the forest. Such types of map are very rare in Austria although there would be enough slopes to map......
I enjoyed it very much and the result was a 3rd place behind Bindi and Kerschi

On Monday it was time for some route choice testing at Torzo, one of my favourite maps. Some did their 5th training there...
We grouped up in 2 groups and had special advice: stay flexible during the route or stick to the plan and additionally some were running right, some left and some anywhere ;)


Right after that training I recognised that my muscles were feeling pretty empty.
I tried to eat as much as possible for lunch, but there was very few served for us, so it was some kind of a crisis. So the afternoon training was not what I was looking forward to. Then at the 6th control it hit me very badly.
Full stop and then walking to 7th control and giving up the training because of black windows in front of my eyes. Concentration and motivation went away very quickly....

Next stop supermarket to get all kinds of carbohydrate stuff to recover quickly.
And then the miracle happened the next day morning.
We did a loop training together with the Swiss and the Finnish team. Even at higher pace it was much better than the day before and the power was gradually coming back in my body. I was still far too slow compared to Tobi or Warti and performed some awesome mistakes at some loops but that's OK.

What a nice training then: We ran alltogether and 1 lead the pack while the others had to learn the 2nd half of the leg to run it from memory right afterwards. This was probably the physically best training of the whole camp.




Wednesday was probably the hardest day with a 13km longdistance to start and followed by 2 sprints behind our accomodation. There I became 3rd of our team twice, although Daniel Hubmann was incredibly fast and won both sprints overall.

Finally on Thursday we did a easter egg hunt at Torzo again. The task was to collect as many controls as possible and to be first at the control. This gave you a chocolate egg. Well Bindi was best in hunting eggs and Ursi won the control picking (girls had a bonus of 6 controls and 2 minutes) which resultet in an unbeatable number of controls from Ursi.

It was a very nice training camp, although the near collapse on Monday was a little bit annoying. Maybe its not the best idea to have a 5000m testrun right before a hard training camp. We should keep that in mind for next year...

HAPPY EASTER!

... to all our blog-visitors, friends, families, relatives, training partners, trainers, colleagues and all orienteers! :D

Enjoy some relaxing days and stay focused at the Easter egg hunt ;)

1.009 seconds of pain and a new Nationalteam-Equipment :)

Today the HLSZ 11 O-Team ran a 5.000m track test on the Marswiese in Vienna. Bindi joined us, too. The starting signal happened at 10:30 a.m. Weather conditions were fine with sunshine, but also much wind. The time-keeping team consisting of Tobi, Mättu, Richard and Gunnel took our split-times and supported us quite well.
Unfortunately, Bindi and Erik quited the race after 3.000m.

Our times:
Kerschi: 15:52 min.
Markus: 16:03 min.
Wolfi: 16:18 min.
Warti: 16:49 min.
Thomas: 17:38 min.

Bindi: 09:50 min.
Erik: 10:21 min.


Just before the starting shot


After the exhausting 5k-test we got our new nationalteam equipment :) It consists of a new tracksuit, 2 running tops (a tight and a normal one), 1 pant, 1 tight, 2 pairs of socks and - individually - a short and a top for the sprint. All parts are made by Trimtex and as you can see on the pictures below it looks really nice and they do comfortably fit. I'm looking forward to try them in our following training camp in Slovakia from 4. - 9. April :)


the new trainer


tight with the tight shirt


O-pant with the normal shirt