Patrick Hofmeister

Finally, after several attempts, I’ve won my first individual German orienteering championship title. On my best discipline, the sprint, I was 18 seconds ahead of the shared silver medalists Alexander Lubina and Felix Spät. Only 48 hours earlier my start was in severe danger due to the volcanic eruption on Iceland. However, as a good sprint orienteer you know how to make fast appropriate decisions so that I booked my train ticket down to Germany immediately after I had heard of the air-traffic collapse in Europe on Thursday.

Thus, I took the train on early Friday morning, via Nässjö, Malmö, Kopenhagen down to Hamburg where I was picked up by my former club mates from Lübeck. After 14 hours of travelling, I reached the final destination Kassel – Kaufungen, right in the middle of Germany. I think it was a wise decision to go out for an easy run on Friday evening to get rid of the tiredness in my legs. The Saturday started with the qualification race in Kassel Wilhelmshöhe. Ten runners were supposed to make it into the A-Final. As usual the qualification was technically rather easy, characterized by a few forest controls, but mainly it was downhill park orienteering. I tried to have a fluent run avoiding any mistakes. I did not fully succeed and made one mistake of 10 seconds when I was standing on the wrong gaffling. Apart from that, it was a decent qualification run where I didn’t push too hard. Although Christian Teich was 55 seconds faster in my heat I was confident before the final race since I knew that I still had a lot of reserves.

The A-Final on early Saturday evening was expected to be a lot more technical and even more downhill than the qualification. I started among all the favorites as the fourth last runner. The first controls very completely downhill. Thus the speed was incredibly fast, but I managed to keep control all the time. Then, there were some short technical controls in a part with a lot of paths and greens. I had some smaller problems in this part: a short hesitation on control 7 using the stairs and paths instead of going straight. Then, running out of control 8, I went back the same way as I was approaching it loosing 5 seconds there, and the same mistake leaving control 9. From then on, it went perfect. I made the right routechoices to the 10th and the 12th control and still had some energy left in my legs. The last controls in the stones went good and I was pretty sure when I crossed the finish line that this might be my first national title in the senior class. Finally, I was 18 seconds ahead of Felix Spät (still a junior showing an outstanding performance) and Sprint-Ace Alexander Lubina who had exactly the same time. Of course, I am very happy about the result and fortunately all the exertions paid off.
Today it was World Ranking Event Long Distance. The forest was very green and I had a hard time fighting through the bushes. I really have to work on my motivation during such unpleasant competitions. I made one big mistake on the 8th control: I’d better followed the paths instead of trying to go straight! Some more mistakes followed during the course so that I was finally 2 minutes down on the lead. Now I am at my parents place in Lübeck. Fortunately, they are giving me a ride back to Jönköping tomorrow because they have planned to visit me this week anyways. Otherwise, I would have had problems to come back to Sweden since the volcanic ash is still disturbing the European air traffic.