Austrian Middledistance Championships - Carinthia
Montag, 18. Mai 2009 um 19:41 Uhr
On sunday the first Championship-medals for this season were rewarded in Austria. On the middle distance course with 5,7km and 250m of climbing there was only one person that didn't seem to be exhausted at all ... unfortunately it wasn't me.
The terrain in St. Jakob i. Rosental (Carinthia) was quite nice, most of the time good runability but sometimes with steep slopes to climb or to run across.
About half of the race was quite good with only minor mistakes. Until control 16 I was on 3rd place altough I lost some time to the 16th control. At this moment in the race it would have been a tripple-win for my club HSV Pinkafeld, with Gernot Kerschbaumer in the lead and Martin Binder 2nd. To control 17 this situation changed dramatically.
Martin had a mistake in the middle of the leg and I had some problems in the control area.
Beginning with this mistake everything started going wrong. Mistake to control 17, too far to the right to 18, wrong routechoice to 19, I didn't see the track directly leading to control 20 and a bad route to 22. As a consequence I was not 3rd but 6th in the final ranking.
One thing that's even worse is the big gap to the winner. Gernot won the race with a time of 36:24 Klaus Schgaguler took the 2nd place with 40:20. Bronze was taken by Christian Wartbichler 41:05.
Running 42:59, I was a bit confused how fast Gernot was this day. Of course I lost a lot of time while making mistakes but also without any second of mistake I would have had no chance to win the Goldmedal.
The middledistance was also our first selection race for WOC in Hungary. To make it to Hungary and to perform well there, I will have to improve, but improving only a bit won't be enough. Some time is still left to do so - this week we are on a training camp in Slovenia (Ljubno) with our next qualification race - a long distance.
Link: Routegadget ÖSTM Middle
Link: Splitalyzer ÖSTM Middle
