Cross Country Champs

After our last post again some time passed. We had our training camp in Portugal with the national team, where all of us participated. There we had some good and technically challenging trainings. I think it helped us a lot to get back some routines.
After all the trainings in Portugal we came back to cold Austria. On sunday it was time for the Austrian Cross Running Champs in Vienna. Our goal was to run the long distance and win a medal with the team.
Warti had a bad day and was far behind. Markus and Kerschi, both ran a very strong race and achieved the individual placings 4 and 5. So it was my task to do my best to fix our medal. Unfortunately from km 6 to the finish I had some problems with my stomach, maybe due to a virus that had caught me the week before.
Finally just 5 seconds or two placings would have been enough for me to finish in place 17 and get us the gold medal. That is truly not the best feeling. Although also the silver medal is quite nice and next year we will be back stronger.....
Results
While we ran the Cross Champs Tobi ran at Lipica Open and was not very satisfied with his races full of mistakes.
His story later here....

Again?

You may have recognised that we have been training in St. Jakob for one and a half week now again. Last week was really nice and I achieved 20 hours of training. Around 70% of that time were X-Country skiing, but strength, indoor cycling and hill training were included as well.

After two years I tried skating on Sunday once again. Sandro came from Graz and we trained together. This 90 min. were a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it!

But maybe last week was a bit too much :S After lunch on Sunday I felt some slight pain in my left foot for the first time. It wasn't a bad one, but still unwell. I rested monday afternoon and did a hill training tuesday a.m. and cross-country skiing in the afternoon. After 85 min. I quited, because I felt the strange pain. Today I tried to skate again and it worked well until 1 hour, which meant I ended the training after 75 min. I'm afraid now that it can be or develop to something serious like I had 1,5 years ago. I couldn't train there for 4 months...

In the afternoon is recovery time and I hope it will be better tomorrow.

short review

Since the last post, some time passed by. I was almost two weeks at home over Christmas and New Year's Eve and had some nice trainings with "my gang" (Richi, Markus, Wieszwerg, Woif, Schani and Mani G.) ;) My main activities during the holidays were sleeping, training, meeting relatives, eating and playing Nintendo Wii with neighbours and friends :D

As you have read in the previous post we had two big X-country skiing weeks in december. That was the reason why I took it a bit easier before Christmas, because the days right after we did our second SSS (special speed session). As there was no snow (let's better say "to less snow for X-country skiing or frozen ski runs") in the surroundings of Henndorf, I ran all intervals. A middle distance course which I ran with Elisa's friend Johan, another O-training with two loops (1 uphill, 1 downhill) and the New Year's Eve run in our neighbour city were included.

At the New Year's Eve run not less than 23 people started for our club, which brought us the second place in the team ranking and therefore a big food box with cheese, ham, pickles, an extra-large salt stick and a 10 l beer barrel :) The course was 5,8 km with I guess some 20 Hm. I finished 7th overall in 19:46 min. and thus 3rd in M20. (I won a bottle of sparkling wine ;)

In the evening our old Richi "canonball" Gathercole celebrated his 40th birthday. He organised a nice party with a delicious meal and beverages. It was a lot of fun and after eating we handed over our gift: the "Fatkiller" :D It's a mixture between a training plan and an Advent calendar. The goal is to bring Richi to train 3 times a week. If he achieves that, he will get a small reward like a chocolate, a beer or some sweets. If he trained just two times, he would get a light penalty (ironing the clothes, 1 day no TV) and doing only 1 training means a hard penalty, e.g. 1 week no alcohol, cleaning the whole flat... We all hope he will pervade the trainings and join us at the 1st AC!

Ok, well, those were my highlights in the last time :D

Currently we are again in St. Jakob im Walde to complete another two endurance weeks. More about that coming soon :)

Endurance go, go, go

Like every december, we put our focus on endurance in the last two weeks. In our traditional St.-Jakob-weeks we are much x-country skiing, doing hill intervals and also some O-trainings if it is possible concerning the snow. Two weeks ago I trained 17h and last week even 21:20h, which is a personal record I think.
Yesterday I celebrated my 21th birthday, so I made myself a nice present with 21 hours of training on my 21th day of birth. This week will be a semi-easy one before starting our special speed training on 30th december.

Christmas-O on Wednesday




















Week 51/2009
























A special thanks to our readers and Merry Christmas to Everyone! :)

Planning weekend for 2010

One week ago we had our planning weekend for the next season in St. Jakob im Walde. The two new coaches enforcing our trainer team - the Swiss Rolf Gemperle as a new nationaltrainer and the second junior trainer Libor Zrídkavésely from the Czech Republic - were also there to introduce theirselves, talk with us, speak about their intentions and of course train together with us. The highlights in orienteering 2010 will be WOC in Trondheim, WUOC in Borlänge and EOC in Primorsko. Things as Jukola, 10Mila, Worldcups and National Championships are on the schedule as well.

Austrian Night Champs and Austria Cup Final

After Wartis preview it was expected to be a hard fight for the medals.
Finally the terrain in St Johann in Tyrol proved to be very hard physically and it was somehow difficult to cope with the map at night.
So many mistakes happened within the whole starting field.
Best was (as usual) Kerschi with a good margin to Bindi, who nearly caught me at the 10th control but then lost some time there. Warti had a stable race with few mistakes and got 3rd, whilst I had to stay out of the podium as 4th not so much behind Warti. My race was full of mistakes and missinterpretations of the map. The terrain was also not my favourite one with high undergrowth nearly everywhere and lots of green areas.

The next day was expected to be a thrilling race between me an Warti. The main reason was Kerschis departure and journey home already at night. This led to the situation that both of us had the chance to win the Austria Cup overall ranking this year.
Course data seemed to be a nice middle distance with not too much climbing. Reality was totally different. The Elite courses were set in a much harder and steeper terrain than the other categories. So the result was a hard and long race through thick and steep forest parts mostly mapped white or light green undergrowth.
I started first of us and tried to push very hard at first controls. Then to the 4th my first mistake was the result of too much pushing and I decided to stay calm and go on with some physical reserves. In the end I did two other mistakes and lost about 3 minutes overall. It was enough for a 3rd place 10 secs behind Markus and 51 behind Bindi who won. Warti got 4th 1:39 behind me and so I won the Austria Cup ranking with just 0,48 points in front of him.

Night-O Preview

On Saturday the Austrian Night-Championships are going to be held in St. Johann/Tyrol. Terrain will be typical tyrolean style, i.e. technical demanding mostly open forest with ditches, but also areas with low runnability and marshy parts. Course length for men elite is 5,2 k in the night and 6,5 on Sunday at the last AC for this season. The starting field is easily manageable: just 10 participants in the Champs.

I'm looking forward to try and test my new Petzl Ultra-lamp, which I got some months ago from the Austrian distributor Agentur Berger in Grünau/Upper Austria, under competition conditions.

Additionally, we made a short night-training yesterday evening. Have a look at the map enclosed.