Silva League in Skåne
Another weekend with Swedish races done – this time a sprint and a long in Skåne. I didn’t go into these races with an especially good feeling, since I got really tired after last weekend, and didn’t really give myself any time to recover properly, but instead focused on continuing my hard training.
Warming up for the sprint, I felt terrible, but I just hoped that it would feel better during the race. Which it actually did, but not by much. Still a really bad feeling in my legs, but I tried to keep it together and push all the way. In the end I was 4th, which I felt quite good about, especially since the bad feeling during the race. However, when analysing my race afterwards, I could see that I totally messed up the middle part of the race, losing 10s on 3 legs in a row! And in addition to that another 10s and a 5s mistake. More than 45s lost, and this was quite an easy sprint. Simply not good enough! Really annoyed with that.
My legs started to feel a bit better during the saturday, but I was still not espacially looking forward to the long distance. I expected a quite easy course, with a lot of running on paths and roads, and that’s not really my cup of tea. Anyway, starting off, I could see that it was exactly what I expected, apart from our butterfly loop in the end, which looked quite nice with 3 loops and a lot of controls. My legs didn’t feel great, and I was just to unfocused in my orienteering in the beginning, making mistakes, constantly looking over my shoulder to see how fast Thierry would catch me, and I actually had thoughts about quitting the race at the spectator control after about 1/3 of the course.
But right before the arena passage, I saw Oleks Kratov ahead of me, and I got a little boost. Running through the arena, I heard that I was 3rd, just 20s behind, despite my bad start, so I got a bit of confidence again. But then I missed again right after that, got annoyed, but decided to push hard on the long leg, which I did, but then I missed again right after that, just because of lack of concentration. I then decided to just go for it. I didn’t feel that tired, in fact, I was feeling stronger and stronger during the whole race, and after that I was my usual orienteering self, running offensive and pushing hard all the way. The loops felt great, I had good flow, and just after them I caught Fredrik Johansson with 4 minutes, and I just continued to push all the way into the finish, and ended up winning with 3 minutes. Really satisfied with the end of my race, that is how I should have run all the way.
Total standings in Silva League
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