The one with the Sprinting...

On Monday afternoon, we had a sprint practice and I really can't say anything more about this training. As a trainer I went into the map area to observe and make points on our elite runners. I found a really good spot where I could see controls 5, 18 and 19 and was able to identify a few basic sprint mistakes, and I'll just write them down here

In a sprint always go the shortest way, ie a STRAIGHT line. It's amazing how many people forget this rule. Always know before you get to a control the direction in which you will run away from the control, stopping to examine this point only wastes time. Always check your control number and control description - in a sprint it's a small area with many controls - so the area for mispunching is huge.

I had a nice run after everybody had left, however as I had already seen 4 or 5 controls it wasn't really fair. Additionally the sprint was REALLY easy so no thinking involved. The only problem was between control 5 and 8, because the control setter had already removed the controls 6 and 7 and so I had to chase her about 150 m in order to get to them, so additional distance, but I didn't actually go to the place where nr. 7 should have been.

Made up some good time at 20 by jumping over the wall - very few people did that, mostly they just ran round. 9 min 45 for 2.6 km was really OK I thought, at about 3:35 pace. I enjoyed it!