Double at University Champs
The University of Paderborn is coming back from the national University Champs with 5 gold medals in their baggage after very succesful days in Leipzig. We won both the Women and Men individual race as well as the relay. Especially Karin Schmalfeld stroke back impressively with a huge margin of 13 minutes to the next female runner. For me it was the first important national elite title and I am very satisfied with my performace that day.
The individual race was held in a heather terrain about an hour away from Leipzig city. The forest around Lausa was slightly hilly with varied runnability and visibility - the white area on the map sometimes turned out to be quite dense. After a lousy start with hesitations at the first and second control I managed to understand the map better at the next controls trying to stay on the red line as close as posible. Until the 16th control I had a very good race so that I never lost more than 10s to the best split. Then, I struggled through the course and lost some time here and there. The biggest mistake happened at the 20th control: I didn’t realised that I crossed the road, didn’t checked the compass direction accurately and searched for a while on the wrong hill, 1′30 was gone. Nevertheless the victory was never in danger and at the end I had a gap of 2:33 to the 2nd Philipp Müller, 3rd was Sebastian Bergmann.
As the two-times defending champion in the relay we, Karin, Roman and I, aimed high and intended to win the tripple being aware of the strength of the team from Dresden. The competition consisted of two sprint races for each of the 3 runners of one team. As the competition area served the Campus of the University Leipzig as well as the nearby Palmengarten. Whereas the first sprint was rather physically demanding the second one was more tecnical with a butterfly and more controls on the Campus. We had 6 solid races without any huge mistake so that we could finally defend our title from the last two years. What a Championship for Paderborn!
Immediately after the relay, the majority of the orienteers journeyed on towards the famous 24 hours orienteering event in Thüringen. Due to the upcoming World Cup I decided not to run the 24 hours but to start in a 12 hours team. I did run 3 courses (1 Long difficult and 2 Long easy)within 5 hours for my team Mitleidstour and went home afterwards to work for the university the next days.