Season Summary (part 1)

After a long time silence here, I want to give an update about my orienteering season 2011.

In winter I tried to improve my running capacities with training high volume combined with some faster trainings. It was a real change after years.
Although I was really tired and slow sometimes I realized that this training should bring me one step further on the long road to success.
The first real measurement was planned to be our annual training camp in February.
This year we were in Portugal, mostly in Mira.
Unfortunately I got at night before the flight to Portugal. So my journey was really uncomfortable.
Finally I even got fever and had stay in bed some days.
In the end was able to do some 5 O trainings on the last days in Portugal.
After Portugal it was again a quiet time of training until the next milestone, which was the Austrian Crossrunning Championship.
There we (Kerschi, Markus and me) had to defend our 2nd place in the team competition from last year. This time we event thought about winning the title.
I had a very good race and could hold a steady pace throughout the race. Also Kerschi and Markus performed very well and we missed the team title just with a very small gap.
It gave me a lot of motivation to see myself performing really good in this running race.
Then Easter came closer. Easter means in the Austrian National Team a track running test and the annual Easter training camp.
I had a good preparation period again with high volume and some key speed units.
When the day of our track test showed up on the horizon I thought that maybe I am not stronger than the year before were I set my 5000m best time to 16:04.
Anyway I tried to run according to plan for a time below 16:00. In the end it was 15:57. Quite ok but no real progress compared to my progression the last years.
Right on the next day we drove to Hungary to start the Easter training camp together with all National Squads.
Right after 2 trainings I found out that I had no power left in my muscles and had to run some training sessions very slow. It turned out that our fast food like dinner and lunch was not very suitable for me.
It cost me a lot of energy and after just 4 days training camp I was totally empty.
On Thursdy before the Easter weekend I flew to Sweden to join my club GMOK for Stigtomtakavlen relay and Elitserien races right afterwards.
At Stigtomtakavlen I had an ok race but still missed some running power.
The Elitserien races became really hard for me and I started to worry a lot about my physical condition. Then we moved to the area of 10mila and trained the rest of the week until 10mila on the official training maps.
It was a nice training week although I still had huge problems with my energy levels.
At 10mila my run was luckily really good except for a tripple mistake at one control which destroyed my performance.
After Sweden it was time to recover and prepare for the Austrian WOC Qualification races. I started to regain a better feeling.
Austrian Sprint Champs in Ried were the first test. It surprised me a lot that I had a good physical capacity compared to other Austrian runners. Just a huge mistake in the beginning were I got confused by some not mapped forbidden areas let me drop out of the medal positions and left me as 6th.
Now i got real big pressure to show a good performance at the 2 last Qualification races in Schneegattern at the beginning of June.
First was the Austrian Middle Champs. I became 4th after a technically bad middle part of the race. Next day was planned a long distance Austrian style (winning time between 60 and 70 minutes). Right from the first controls I realized that I had a very high pace and good focus. So I did just very small mistakes and became again 4th but this time even 2nd of the Qualification.
So the miracle happened and I got qualified for WOC.
The following week I flew to Finnland and then to Sweden by car to run the Nordic O Tour races there.
In Finnland I had a good race except again one bigger mistake but was far from qualification for the final. Jukola in between was an ok race with some problems in the last part because of extreme tiredness. In Sweden I ran a very good sprint and was very satisfied although I was again out of any final.