Patrick Hofmeister

The Nordic Orienteering Tour consisting of 3 World Cup races in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo kicked off yesterday with the super-combination, a combined middle and sprint distance race. I became 59th out of 77 runners and was around 6min30s behind the winner Daniel Hubmann. The first part of the course had middle distance character. I think I managed that part pretty well only losing a couple of seconds here and there due to slight hesitations. After 5k there was the map change and a seemless change to urban sprint terrain. Apart from some slower route-choice to the 8th, 14th and 17th control I showed a decent performance also in this part of the course. As good as it went technically as bad I felt physically. Since the EOC relay I have been suffering from the Tibialis-anterior-Syndrom, an injury that attacks the muscle at the under leg close to the shin bone. Before the start it felt pretty ok but during the race it went worse and the leg felt horrible especially on the sprint course. It was like a huge recurrent cramp that went through my leg. Due to the fact that I was not nominated for the first IKHP team at Jukola, the decision not to start at all at this competition was not too hard to make. I will try to recover instead until the World Cup Tour goes on next Tuesday with the Knock-out Sprint in Stockholm. If I am able to continue the tour and go up with the national team to the WOC training camp in Trondheim will be decided after the Sprint on Tuesday.

You can check my GPS track here: http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/20100617mcH/

The European Championships 2010 are over, time to have a short review. Starting with the sprint distance on Sunday where I had a very bad day as far as my o-technique was concerned. In the first part which was open forest with a dense network of difuse aisles, I totally got confused and made almost two minutes mistake. Of course, the run was ruined. By hindsight i should have relied more on my compass and distance feeling than counting the aisles. With regard to the long qualification the next morning, I decided to leave out the B-Final on Sunday afternoon which was a good decision since I felt pretty strong on Monday’s long qualification.

Technically, I had a good run I must say. I just lost some time on the routechoices to the 7th, 8th and 12th control because I did not manage to follow the planned route. As I came to the finish I heard Per Forsberg saying that I didn’t make it into the A-Final, but was out only by some seconds. This placement, however, should only last for a short moment until I read out my SI-Card and realized that I had a misspunch. Apparently, I did the rookie mistake not punching the refreshment control. I definitely have to work on this since it was not the first misspunch at an important international championship.

The following day it was time for relay. I was running the last leg after Alexander Lubina and Torben Wendler. Alex had a solid run, not in the very top but only a little bit more than 3 minutes behind the leading teams. For Torben, it was almost the same, not a very good run but neither bad. So, I went out in the woods together with the Portuguese team around ten minutes behind the leader. My legs felt strong that day and I could find a good pace at the beginning. To the 4th control, however, I made a huge mistake when I came down the slope too much in western direction. I mixed up two ditches which gave me a hard time to relocate. To the 6th control it was better to cross the green and run over the hill instead of running around. Another mistake happened at the 9th where I did not see the yellow area in the terrain and got confused. The rest of the course went pretty okay. Unfortunately, two teams (Estonia and Ukraine) managed to pass me on the last leg so that we came 18th in the nation’s ranking. As Top15 was our stipulated goal, we were running a little bit below expectations.
Unfortunately, after the relay my shin bone started to hurt. Probably, due to the fact that I was running in dobb spikes for the first time since last year’s world champs. The pain was getting worse the following days which prevented me from starting in the Long Distance B-Final on Saturday. Now, after three days without running, it felt a lot better which is why I am confident with regard to the upcoming Nordic World Cup Tour.
As there are a lot of discussions going on about the quality of this European Championships, I would like to comment on that. From a logistics point of view it was a very good championship. The accommodation was just fantastic providing good food and services. It was situated 200m away from the finish area of both sprint qualification and final. All other trainings and competitions could be reached within 15 minutes driving. Another plus point can be given for the course planning. I think all of the courses were technically demanding and complied with the IOF regulations. The deviation in winning time on the long distance was probably mainly due to the hot weather although this could have been taking into account during the preparations since temperatures around 30 degrees are not unlikely during summer in Bulgaria. But there are two things I would really criticize. First of all, the poor media coverage has to be mentioned. An international championship without GPS and up-to-date live results is not attractive to follow. In the finish area, it was okay to follow the races, compared to the World Champs in Hungary or Ukraine, it was not a big difference but looking at the online results made people going nuts. But my strongest criticism is related to the map drawing. How can it be that there are tons of new symbols on a map for an international championship? Small trees, water features etc. got their own smaller symbol on the map which were not readable while running. I think this is even more worth to discuss than other topics. Nevertheless, it was fantastic to compete in the nice Bulgarian forests. In my opinion this event really contributed to the diversity of our sport, which is good. The above mentioned issues, however, should be evaluated carefully.