Monday 29 June 2009

Dansk Park Tour 4

Yep yep. Last weekend was the last round of the Danish Park Tour races. I ran the first race really well. I maintained a high speed through the whole course (after a tough week of training with 3 interval sessions I didn't know any different!).
It's a bit boring (and arrogant) to talk about all the good things I did. So I will now, as usual, sytematically list my mistakes and shortcomings :)
I made a couple of bad route choices on the 3rd and 4th controls. I also made a mistake early on the way to the 11th where the purple line obscured an impassable wall. I lost 30 seconds maximum from these mistakes but still managed a convincing win.
I realised in the next hour or so whilst trying to recover that perhaps I had pushed a bit too hard in the first race. I felt fatigued from the beginning of the 2nd race. I tried to put it in the back of my mind and concentrate on the navigation, but as it turned out my mind had also not fully recovered :) My first mistake was on the 4th where I took a risk that I would be able to find a nice hole in the green to bash through before the control, but I just kept getting stuck and had to go around. I lost 5-10 seconds standing in the middle of the control circle at the 5th before I saw the control stuffed down in a ditch instead of on the vegetation corner. On the 10th control I made the coolest mistake I have made in a long time... I went straight, only reading the buildings on my map (lazy tired mind) and came across an impassable hedge. Instead of looking at my map and minimizing my mistake I just thought 'oh, I'll just run around it. So unluckily I chose to run right and then ended up going backwards and then did the exact same thing one more time before the map spat me out again back at the 9th control :)
I lost some time on the 11th because I didn't see the track coming into the control from the left, and also some time at the 12th where I just ran past the control looking for a bush instead of a tree. I managed to get my mind together for the last few and finish well, but still only managed a 4th place.
Luckily my big win in the morning was just enough for me to win the day overall, and as it turns out the whole park series :) I just hope, well, I plan to pull out a sprint like the morning at the World Games in a few weeks.

1 comment:

Ramon said...

Haha that 9-10 mistake was awesome ... thats the kinda of thing I would do