Elitserien Massstart - Mora
Donnerstag, 02. Juni 2011 um 23:50 Uhr
Today was the longdistance massstart competition of the "Pre EOC" races in Mora. Almost 100 competitors headed out at the same time for 19,2 km in the very fast Mora-terrain.The course was divided into two big loops with a mapexchange after an arena passage and two butterflies (or phi-loops) on each map.
Although I was starting from one of the last rows and also passed the starttriangle among the last runners, my first part was quite good. I didn't have any big mistakes at all (sometimes I didn't see the controls in the greener parts immediatly).
When passing the finsh arena and changing to the second map I had a quite good intermediate position. Also Pavlo Ushkvarok, who finished 7th place went out for the second loop at the same time.
To the first control of my second loop, I than mad my biggest mistake (and more or less my only one) in this race. Keeping in mind that I already passed through that area, I didn't read the map carefully enough and tried to run a bit faster in order to catch runners infront of me. Unfortunately this was the wrong tactic at that time. Not really knowing where I were at that moment I wrongly predicted my position only a few meters away from the control. In fact I have only made half the way to it but tried to approach the control wich, of course, resulted in a bigger mistake.
It took some time until I recognized my mistake and continued to the right place. According to Winsplits my errortime was more than 3 minutes to that control.
Getting closer to the control I than saw other runners again. When running the first part of the butterfly, which was some kind of double-phi-loop distributed over both maps, I recognized that I probably had the shorter loops on my first map. Nevertheless I managed the loops without mistakes and still felt quite good. Running the long leg to the first common control of the last butterly I could manage to run away from the runners who left the butterfly at the same time and even managed to overtake two runners who where running quite long ahead of me. Also the last butterfly went quite good for me and I could pass some runners and get closer to some more.
Passing the spectators there was one runner just punching ahead of me and three more runners about half a minute ahead. Feeling still strong, I tried to get closer to that group. On the uphill part after the spectators control I could get a big step closer to them. I gained second per second until at the secondlast control we almost punched at the same time. To the last control I could overtake the first runner of those three, and the two others punched only a little ahead at the last control. In the final spurt I could manage to pass one of them, the other one unfortunately finished a few centimeters ahead of me.
With 1:41:34 I took the 34th place. Winner with an incredible lead by 3 minutes was Olav Lundanes (1:30:03). William Lind and Fredrik Johansson took the places two and three.
I am quite satisfied with my race, it could have been even better by avoiding the stupid mistake on the second loop, but I can't change that anymore.
Although 19,2 km sounds like a long torture it was real fun to run today. The terrain was really nice and extremely fast. I hope the next race on saturday and also the EOC races next year will be in similiar terrain.
Elitserien Mora 2011 - Longdistance Map 1
Elitserien Mora 2011 - Longdistance Map 2
Results Elitserien Mora 2011
Splittimes (different loops rearranged to same order)
