Patrick Hofmeister

Everybody knows the famous story of the nutty knight-errant Don Quijote written by Miguel Cervantes which is considered to be one of the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age and perhaps the entire Spanish literary canon. For me, as an ambitious Erasmus student ;-), there was no doubt that I had to go to visit Cervantes’ place of birth in Alcalá next to Madrid. Lucky me, that this weekend Alcalá constituted the venue of the 10th Liga Española ranking event.

So, we pulled out from Barcelona on Friday afternoon, a six hours trip towards the capital of Spain. Owing to a good sleeping bag and thick clothes, my first night on a Spanisch hard floor was quite comfortable, although the estimated inside temperature of the gym was about 5 degrees. On Saturday there were two races: Middle Distance in the morning and a Night Sprint in the historical city centre of Alcalá in the evening. For the last two weeks I have suffered a big cold and haven’t trained a lot so my expectations for this weekend were quite low. The terrain for the middle and the long distance consisted of open areas with many small valleys, cliffs and rocks with pretty good runability. I managed the course quite well except of the 5th and 18th control where I lost around 30s because I misinterpreted the curves right before the control. To the 10th control it would have been better to come from above to the control crossing the valley earlier. I finished, as usual ;-), in 4th spot, 2:45 behind Tommi Tölkkö. Middle

The night sprint was a good possibility to get to know better the city of Alcalá. Start and Finish were at the “Plaza de Cervantes” with many spectators watching the event. The course was pretty easy with many long legs where you could study the map quite intensively. Moreover, the were two closed doors (the doors were additionaly marked as closed on the plastic bag) in the castle part of the race which affected the legs 6-7 and 7-8. Although my race was far away from perfect with many hesitations and wrong decisions, I finished 2nd, 30s behind Roger Casal. After the race I had time to visit the city by night. Sprint