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