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...