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Yesterday we had Sprint Championships in Austria and, for the first time ever, I was the lucky-one winning it. It is my second individual gold medal since Longdistance in 2006 and I hope it will be not that long time again until I can win one more titel.

The championships were held in Ried im Innkreis in Upper Austria.
The course was a mixture of park-terrain, living area and town center with some easy-running parts which suited me quite well.
The first part, which was in the park, was quite tricky. There was always a change between open, semi-open and forested park and distance between controls was very short. I decided to start with moderate speed and take myself time for the first controls which turned out to be a quite good decision, as some of my opponents already missed valuable seconds at those controls.
Beginning at control 7 the running part started and it was also there where I managed to take the lead in the race. Also the next part in the town was pretty OK for me, I once chose the wrong route missing 6 seconds to the fastest time but the rest was quite good. At the spectators passage I heard that, at that time, was leading by about 30 seconds ahead of my clubmate Helmut Gremmel.
After the passage there were only a few, and easy controls, left so I tried to push a bit harder to keep that lead or to get even some more seconds ahead.
In the finish I was ahead of Helmut by 33 seconds.
As I was ranked quite bad in the Austrian ranking (because of my injury last year) the strongest opponents were still to come to the finish, so waiting began.
As Gernot Kerschbaumer, also clubmate, definding champion and the strongest Austrian orienteer at the moment, came to the finish I got a bit nervous. Than the speaker announced that his time was not good enough, so I realized that I might win a medal that day.
More and more runners got to the finish ranked behind me until suddenly there was only one left. When Martin Binder reached the finish my nervousity reached a climax, but than I heard he is only in fourth place, which made me the winner of the race.
It was a great feeling winning this title for the first time. Until so far I have had only managed to come in second place two times.
The race was also a selection race for NORT and also the first selection race for WOC in France, so right now I am a big step closer to my goal of running world champs in France.


Austrian Sprint Championships 2011 - Ried / Innkreis
Link: Results
Link: Splittimes
Link: Map