Training Log Archive: Arnold

Austrian Team Championships, my home forest near Vienna.

An insane event, the idea is that you have 3 people in a team with 3 maps but only 1 sportident chip. All team members need to go to the 4 mandatory controls (roughly at 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and the end of the course), but all other controls only 1 team member need visit.

In practice this means that 1 team member is the "active runner", sprinting like mad for 5-20 minutes and then handing over to the next active runner, while himself slowly jogging (or running at reasonable speed, depending) to the next mandatory control, or to the next handover where he is up if before

So the art is in choosing where to hand over, and then obviously also executing these decisions..

I ended up doing only about 15% of the active running (controls 10-13, 16-18 and 24-27 of 34), but at what speed...almost threw up after the first bit and was seriously suffering for it through the second bit (also I had to run quite fast to make it to no. 16 straight from 13 before the "active runner" made it through 13-14-15-16)

We came third in Elite, what a result! But it wasn't due to me...although I suppose chosing the right team members is also an art!!

Test running part of Sunday's elite race - where I was going to be the commentator until I fell ill on Saturday night...

a pretty green forest, rocky and steep, ugh