Austrian Team Championships
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After Sprint Champs on saturday, it was a team-competition, and also championships, today.
The rules for the competition are quite easy: 3 runners form one team, they have one SI-card, and that SI-card needs to run the whole course. The team can devide the course on their own, but there are a few controls where all 3 runners have to be present at the same in order to be allowed to punch the control. All teams are starting in a massstart.
This year there was also a map exchange, with first a bunch of controls which could be run in random order, followed by a team control on the first map. After mapexchange there was a normal course until the next team control and than one more bunch of random order controls to the last control which also was the last team control.
As yesterdays sprint race was the selection race deciding the team line-up of my club HSV Pinkafeld for this team competition, I was in the team with Helmut Gremmel (2nd place yesterday) and Gernot Kerschbaumer (he and Martin Binder shared 4th place yesterday, so the third spot in the team was decided by lotting).
After the startsignal we first decided in which order we should take the first 15 controls to the team control and map exchange and than after we found a suitable changingpoint for our first exchange I headed out for the first 5 controls.
In team competition it is always qiute fun to run. The teams are allowed freely to decide where and also how often to change the runner carrying the SI card. So even if teams decide to take controls in the same order they might use different points to change to their teammates.
We decided to have quite long intervalls in the first part so after I took the first three controls few other teams already changed for the first time changing in a fresh runner. We were a group of about 5 to 6 runners who took the same control order in the beginning and therefore were running quite close together. After an uphill section to 5th control and continuing uphill to the next one I knew, that on top of the hill there'll be Gernot waiting for me to take the SI-card, so I increased the speed uphill and made a small gap to the next runners and Gernot continued with high speed. As the other runners also reached the top they suddenly had to realize that we just had our changeover and that it would be even harder to follow now because on the one hand they had to put in some extra effort in order to keep up with my pace but now where facing a totally fresh runner again.
In fact it was there where we already managed to run away from the other teams widening the gap continuingly. After the first team control we were about 2 minutes ahead of the next team.
Also the next part was quite good for us, we changed a bit more often and increased our lead to the next team control. Also the last part of the race was quite good. As most of the time two runners had plenty of time when they were not racing, planning the running order for the last part was no problem at all.
Without any big mistakes we could keep our lead and for one more year carry the title Team-champion.
Following the map-links below you can find the two maps with markings indicating our chosen control-order and also crosses showing our changeover points. Although the whole course was about 14km I was only running around 9,8km and an even smaller share in high speed.
Austrian Team Championships 2011
Link: Results
Link: Splittimes
Link: Map Teamcompetition First part
Link: Map Teamcompetition Second part
