Austrian Middle-champs

Last weekends competitions were the real kick-off for the orienteering season. We enjoyed two beautiful orienteering days in Carinthia with the highlight on sunday, where we were fighting for medals on the austrian middle distance championships. Warti and me ran the "Bundesländerstaffel" on saturday as well, which was a good warm up for sunday. It was defenitly very nice to get some sun on our white skins and the temperatures of about 25-28 degrees were actually quite comfortable in the forest.
The middle distance on sunday was not only important because of the austrian championships but also for the WOC and WC qualifications. It was really nice to see Warti performing so well and achieving the 3rd place behind an incredibly fast Gernot Kerschbaumer and Klaus Schgaguler. Wolfi and me performed not that well as we made several mistakes in different parts of the race. For my part the race started really well, and I was immediately in the right flow-feeling. I lost maybe 10 seconds near control 3 because I was too much to the right and about 45 seconds on my way to the 4th, as I was climbing a bit too much and ended up in the steep part of the slope where the runnability was not that good. Some small mistakes followed until the 16 control, but they were still OK. At 16 my real problems started. I chose the wrong routechoice and followed the path on the left which forced me to take this huge climbing at the end of the route. I was really tired after that, so I lost the direction to the control and lost about 1 minute because I came too much to the right. Angry about this mistake I tried to push really hard down to 18th and suddenly I didn't unsterstand the situation on the map anymore. I was too much to the right again and it took me some time to relocate. 1,5min lost..... To number 19 I chose the wrong route again and went down to the left. To 20 I didn't see the path under the line and to number 22 I got stuck in the fence which costed again valuable seconds. Well well. I guess it was a pure mental problem that I f**** up this race on the second part, as I should have made a restart at control 16 where the terrain characteristics changed dramatically. It was a bad start for the following qualifications... But hey, everybody who knows me a bit knows, that this makes me stronger and more motivated for friday where we will run a long distance in Slovenia! :P I will start fast and finish faster with my lessons learned of this first race and I am sure Wolfi who had similar experiences will do the same.
As Warti showed this weekend, we are prepared to challenge the "old" boys in the nationalteam and I think this gives us an even brighter picture of the following 2 weeks where the WOC team will be selected.

Here are the maps and results of the weekend:
Middle
results
split-analysis

Bundesländerstaffel:
results
split-analysis


Prize-giving ceremony on Sunday