Great Weekend in Serbia

As Warti was at a training camp with his club in Lungau and Tobi training at home I decided to participate at an O-weekend in Serbia.
Markus Lang and me had been discussing a while about our options for the weekend around the 1st of May. There were several possibilities like Alpe Adria Cup in Regensburg or Tipo Cup in Hungary. But then we discovered the Memorial Cika Dusko Jovanovic some kilometers south of Belgrade in Serbia. Organisers offered a free accomodation and entry fee for runners ranked R in the current Worldranking. Additionally it was possible to win some prize money for the first 6 in the WRE Event on Saturday.
So we were covinced that it would be a nice trip although the travel was a very long one.
Finally we started at 8:00 on Friday 1st at Seebenstein and then drove via Budapest to the Hungarian-Serbian border. There we had to wait about an hour due to strict controls at the EU outer border.
When arriving in Serbia the first impression was a lot better than expected as the Austrian Touring Club told Markus the streets are in no good constitution. Also the landscape and the villages along the road were similar to Hungary or other countries in Eastern Europe.
At approximately 16:30 we arrived in Ljig the city of the evening sprint, the first event of the 3 days competition. We didn't know exactly the place were the competition will be staged so we wandered around the towncenter and then we saw some people with orienteering equipement.
Luckily we found the finnish area and were greeted by an old CISM colleague, appearing to be the main organiser.
The sprint then started at 20:30 with mass-start. It was already very dark and we were glad to have our standard night lamps with us unlike other runners having just a small LED lamp to read the map.
The order of controls was free and so it was a little tactical. Maybe a different route at the beginning would have been better concering the loads of crowds at the first controls. I really had to push the speed a little to get away from the huge pack.
Then my race went ok even though the stinging nettles at the slopes in some areas were really painful to my legs.
I became second some 50 seconds behind Ionut Zinca, who won while Markus had some troubles by almost forgetting one control.
Afterwards we drove to our accomodation up in the mountains. Markus' car had a loose contact and we got stopped by the police. They wanted us to pay a huge amount of money but luckily we could avoid this with the help of one of the organisers.
Next was the WRE on Saturday. Organisers did a very good job and provided a nice finish area with some shops, even live results at a screen and the roasting of two suckling pigs each day!
My race started fast and secure with the first 3 controls. But to the 4th and 5th I had some problems with the right interpretation of the map. To 4th I was unsure about the actual position related to the green and open areas and lost at least 30 seconds. The 5th then should be an easy control, but it became my worst of the whole race. My plan was to run along the path till the end and then to the second ditch were the control should be located. Unfortunately the path was ending much too early and I looked a few ditches before the one with the control => 1min was gone. The remaining controls then went without major problems and I finished 4th just 1 second behind the 3rd. That was a hard fact, but "even one second mistake is still not good enough"(T.G.) so I deserved the 4th place.

In the evening it was time for lunch at 17:00 and then dinner at 20:00. Afterwards again dinner cause the organisers invited the representatives of all clubs to a nice dinner with good meat of different kinds and some drinks.
But that was not the last thing that day. Right afterwards we joined the ongoing party in front of the accomodation. Nobody in Austria would even think about partying the day before a championship ( it was Serbian long distance championship next day). But here it was really funny and a lot of people joined the party.
Then finally the last day arrived with long distance starting from 11:00. The winning time was planned to be about 75 minutes on the 8.6km course with over 450m climbing. In fact I had a good races and used 69 minutes, while Ionut Zinca smashed the race with a time of 61 minutes.

I became 3rd and also overall 3rd. I received a diploma and a herbal extract for that. That day I also tried out the suckling pig, which was really delicious. So a great orienteering weekend in Serbia ended on Monday 1:00 back in Seebenstein.
There is another post at Markus Langs homepage concerning our weekend in Serbia.

Nice weekend in the mountainous Lungau

Last weekend I joined my austrian club, ASKÖ Henndorf Orienteering, for a nice and tough training camp in the south-eastern district of Salzburg, called Lungau. Around 55 people from my club + 5 runners from another club in Salzburg + 10 carinthians took part in the training camp. We stayed at a beautiful small hotel in Maria Pfarr, right on an orienteering map. Additionally, I didn't just do the trainings, but organised a training and helped to set out and collect the controls. I did 6 trainings in 2,5 days, including a competition on Sunday morning. Gassi and Schani were missing due to diseases and Woif is in Norway, but anyway, it was great fun with Tobi, Mani W., Markus, Robi and Richi :D

Friday
morning: arrival, moving into our rooms, 1st training -> normal O-course with much butterflies and sometimes a piece of the map were cut out, so it became a bit more difficult to orienteer.
afternoon: "Tree-root"-O-course, on all tree roots there were small paper cards with numbers from 30 to 1. The one who's first takes the 30, the second runner 25, ...
evening: easy running with lamp in the village with a sprint-map



Saturday
morning: WISBI-OL = "How fast am I?"-courses, that was my training ;) I prepared four different courses varying the difficulty and length, with SI.
afternoon: Markus organised a training with reduced maps: black and brown for beginners and just brown for advanced ones. I ran the "long" course (3,2 km :P)



Sunday
5th Salzburg-Cup at "Fernwald". M19-, 6,5 km, 280 Hm, so it would become a longer middle distance. I planned to run around 45 min. Therefore I decided to "jog" the first 10 min. and speed up to have a hard 35'-middle-competition. The first 5 controls were no big deal and although I was running not full speed I had several best times. When I had a look at the watch and speeded up, I caught up Robi, who started 4 min. ahead of me. Maybe thus I (better we) made a huge mistake at the 6th control (I'm not quite sure if the map is 100% o.k. there, because when I put in some of the controls I missed that one again, this time coming from another direction with another attack point). The other part of the race was all in all fine, with small mistakes at the 14th and 16th (-> see map). At this race I started last and caught up all runners who started before me :P

results and split-times here

I enjoyed this 3 days really much and had a lot of fun :)
I'm looking forward to 2 nice O-trainings with the military-team!

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