So last weekend was the Austrian relay championships on Saturday and the 8th ranking event on Sunday. To be honest I knew before going that I wasn't going to be competitive, but at least I've started to train again. I was in a relay team with Roland "Sportvogl" Vogl and Uwe "I'm even slower than you Richi!" Merl, so we hadn't really reconded with a chance of a podium. I was the start runner, and after control one I knew this was going to be even worse than I imagined. I came in last and a good 20 minutes down on the leading teams. I've attached the map but won't go into the mistakes - too embarressed.Uwe took over and had a steady run, taking just 10 minutes longer than me but unfortunately keeping that last place intact. Roland took over and actually managed to overtake another relay team, so we came in 2nd last. The upside was that 3 teams infront of us had been disq., and with a field of 7, that left us...yup...you guessed it, in 3rd place.
And then it happened, this a..h..e guy who runs the other OL shop got our team disqualified because Roland is not an Austrian national (neither am I) and does NOT have his main residence in Austria (I do). He claims RULES are RULES, but the rest of the OL family know the real reason, he is a bad business man, and the only way he can get to Roland is by doing something nasty like this. So we didn't actually get medals, but a consolation prize of chocolates, which Gitte really enjoyed!
We spent the night in a great little alpin hotel in the Solden valley, at a height of just over 1580m. It was actually the high point of the weekend, especially the food, which was very welcome after a hard day in the forest :) The only problem was that Hanna had problems sleeping (she hardly didn't) which of course means that parents Richard and Christine didn't get any sleep either :(
Sunday was another story entirely. The 9 km were always going to be absolutely murderous, and thats what they proved to be. I was in the forest for 2 hours and I worked hard for every minute. Certainly my orienteering skill has been seriously neglicted this year, and it really shows. I hope that I will be able to get back to form before the end of the season comes around. The map is great, well drawn and very technical. Some errors on my part were to 1 (forgot to concentrate), 5 (wrong attack point) 7 (compass error) 12 (bad route choice) 13 (deliberate bad route choice) 14 uncertainty - the list continues - but actually I was quite enjoying myself, even if it was taking forever.
Over the second half of the course, things did improve, except for control 25 were lack of sleep and motivation (and not to mention over 100 minutes in the forest) took control and I spent 10 minutes searching for a control that I passed 3 times before actually finding it. Naja, without this mistake I would have been happy. If you are interested, there is this fantastic gadget that you can use to look at the routes - it is worth a look! So that is the story of a 15km, 400 hm , 2 hour ordeal on Sunday.On the plus side, Christine was in a league of her own and cleaned up on her course. Can you believe it, somebody said to Christine that she was taking away ranking points from the other ladies - I was trying to figure it out. She hasn't trained seriously since last summer, hasn't trained at all since Xmas, has had a child, major operation, has lost her job, found a new one and she is still too good for the D21K - I think the others need to look elsewhere to be honest!
And that was the weekend really - it was not really great, but it wasn't bad. I hope that I can improve on my preformance at the next few events :) If you are interested in the results, then please check them out here.
Keep well, more later,
Richard.
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