EOC Middle – Good speed but disastrous navigation

The middle distance was my big goal this championship, and I was feeling very confident coming into the competition. My running felt good, and I knew that I was able to make the perfect race. Picking up the map in the start, I realised that this was going to be very fast. Of course I already knew this before, but I was hoping to the very last moment that it was going to be trickier than expected, but obviously it wasn’t.

I set off at a really high speed, pushing myself hard already from the start, and did a great race for 19 out of 22 controls. To number 5 I took the wrong routechoice, losing 25 seconds, but I didn’t this realise until looking at the split times afterwards. At control 18, towards the very end of the course, I did a 30 second mistake being a bit sloppy with my compass, and overshot the control with some 50 meters.

At this point I was 4th, and not very far behind Thierry in 3rd place, but the worst was yet to come. Towards the last control, I misinterpreted the map, thinking that there was a yellow gap in the thick green under the line, and going for a straight route. Which turned out to be disastrous. Coming in to the green I saw no possible way through, and started running left trying to find a better way. Eventually I just tried to cut through to the last control, but this was a bad idea. I fought myself through 30 meters of thorns and brambles, losing 70 (!) seconds and 10 places, coming out bloody and scratched on the other side. Fuck. Very stupid, and I couldn’t help being really dissappointed, despite a decent 14th place in the end.

After analysing my race, I could see that me and the winner Daniel Hubmann had very similar speed during most of the course, the only difference being that he was able to hold it all together, which I clearly wasn’t.

Map
Split times