Patrick Hofmeister

10Mila 2009 is over… and it was really worth a trip. We took off already on Friday to run the Elitserien in Helsingborg. It was a very interesting forest-sprint with a steeper part at the slope and a flat part in the middle of the course that offered some good route-choice possibilities. I was totally absent that day, crashed at the 4th and 6th control and lost almost one minute at the two controls. Another stupid mistake occured at the spectator control where I misinterpreted the thickets and the race was completely botched. I seem to be not focused at the moment, it has to be considered why…
The 10Mila, the biggest relay originally held in the Stockholm region, came down to Skane this year. So we took the opportunity to participate with a German team that was composed by regional OWL (Ostwesfalen-Lippe) runners and some friends such as my brother, Eike Bruns, Lars Resch and Alexander Lubina who was our man at the starting line. He did a good solid run and changed to me in 97th spot, some 6 minutes down to the leading teams. Then, it was my turn. Already at the 1st control I crashed. I tried to close the 200m gap to the group right before me, overpaced and got stuck at the wrong gaffling and lost almost 8 minutes until I was able to relocate. F***, I had to re-start… But now I could run my own race, passing team after team until the spectator control. On the last loop I made another stupid mistakes in the marshes and lost again some minutes. Furthermore, the coldness of 3 degrees below zero and the wet marshes made my muscles cramp so that the speed wasn’t the best at the final part of the course. Finally, I finished in 124th spot but lost more than 20 minutes on my leg. Incredible… But 10Mila is a team-competition and my team mates mostly did great jobs, especially my clubmates Eike and Christoph on their night legs brought our team next to the Top100. Some up and downs in the following legs resulted in a final 128th place of 349 teams. For our first 10Mila not bad…

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10Mila

… was the slogan that accompanied us during our first training camp in Hungary. Together with the German national team, including youth and junior runners we spent the week before Easter in Miscolc to prepare for the upcoming WOC. On the Easter weekend there were organized the Postas Cup, normally a rather regional event but due to the official training camp, this year attended by many national teams.

A priori we decided not to take part in the official training camp next to the Slovakian border but to focus more on the terrain in the Bükk mountains. This kind of terrain is mainly characterized by its steep and stony slopes. Thus, not very surprisingly, the training camp turned out to be especially physically very demanding. I had to adapt the programme slightly due to some reoccuring problems with my Achilles tendon. Nevertheless, I was able to train more than 13 hours, mainly in the forest with the map. We had sessions such as Postenjagd, reduced map, relay starts, route-choice training, forest sprint and control picking. On Friday, right before the first competition, a sprint prologue in Eger, we had a 5000m run. This session was supposed to simulate the sprint-day during the WOC week when the qualification and final is held on one single day. Naturally, we were far away from our records with running times around 17 minutes. The competitions were rather disappointing. In the Sprint I climbed an unpassable fence that I recognized after the race. Although I was not officially disqualified, morally I was it. The Middle qualification was ok apart from one stupid 40s mistake at the second last control. In the Final (the same day) I had not very much energy left in my legs, made two mistake entering control 2 and 5 and finally finished 5th in the B-final. On Sunday there was long distance, 16,2k and 670m climbing. At the beginning the course was quite fast with two long route-choices and the controls mostly in white forest with good runability. Unfortunately, my race was already over in the first butterfly where I mixed up the loops and was disqualified. The misfortune climaxed in the relay when I lost my SI-Card on my way to the spectator control, the search took around 2 minutes.

Now, after a 10 hour trip on the East-European highways and a short stop in Leipzig over night, I am back in Paderborn where the summer semester has already begun. Thus, I have to get back into a good work-training balance the next weeks. Already on Thursday evening I am going to kick off for the Skandinavian trip to Eliteserien Sprint in Helsingborg and 10Mila in Perstorp. You can follow the races on 10Mila homepage:

Team LOWL:

1 Alexander Lubina
2 Patrick Hofmeister
3 Eike Bruns
4 Christoph Hofmeister
5 Lars Resch
6 Björn Risch
7 Sören Riechers
8 Karin Schmalfeld
9 Niko Risch
10 Roman Schulte-Zurhausen

Maps:

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