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.

Austrian Military Championships

Today Warti and me ran the Military Champs in Orienteering.
Usually there are just categories using a mapscale of 1:25000 and not very detailed and old maps. But today organisers prepared a very special course for us. It was very similar to the course on the 1:25000 map but with some extra controls. The special thing for us was that the course crossed 3 different o-maps. The first one was 1:10000, then 1:7500 and finally 1:5000. So we had 3 map changes, but all maps were already handed out at the start.
We, all 5 of us from the military sports group started in between the other starters in an intervall of 3 minutes.
I had a little advantage over the others cause I had ran on all of the maps before.
So to the 9th control I caught Warti who started 3 minutes before me and then I managed to get a little gap to him and finished in 40:18.
Finally this was worth the second place just 49 secs behind Gernot "Kerschi" Kerschbaumer who won. Warti finished 4th with a time of 43:55.
It was a nice race with not really difficult controls but some routes and next year we will run again.

Some day in 1986

...a mapmaker drew the map "Hilmtor" somewhere in the Wechsel-area. And exactly on this map we made a training on last Thursday =) It was really interesting how much features didn't change, most of the paths, all water ditches, stones, cliffs and even some thickets stayed the same. Of course, the contour lines were correct, too. Reasoning (clearances became thickets, ...) and a bit of combining made it easy to orienteer. Nice training!

soon finished...

Last weekend we had another two championships: Salzburg district championships in Relay and Long distance (which was rather a shortened middle). Both were organised on a new map in Kals am Großglockner/East Tyrol. As I had some kind of a cold before, I was not sure to start, but finally I was able to compete. But I recognised that this season is getting too long now and I want to end it. Soon... Military championships on 7th of October and then I want to run the Graz half marathon on 11th. Currently, I have a problem with my feet and if it won't disappear I fear that I can't run... :S we will see, I hope all the best! :)

Anyway, I ran the relay with Markus König and - yes :) - we won. On Sunday I could collect another LM title :)