Predictable? No way!

Polish Championships in Night-O

We started our journey to the Warsaw's surroundings about 5 hours before the first starting time. Unfortunately, some of our competitors didn't manage to come in time and just lost the opportunity to take part in this exciting competition. You'd probably ask why??? The reason was our small car crash in Głuchów...
As far as my performance is concerned, it was my worst orienteering race in Poland this year. My legs were some 8 times too fast for my brain that day! I lost over 16 minutes because of my silly mistakes and missed the medal by only 5 minutes. In fact, I didn't deserve it at all...



Warsaw Orient Meeting 2008 - sprint

On Friday morning I started feeling ill and it was only getting worse and worse. I thought I would have no chances of achieving sth the following day and decided to run quickly enough not to come back home completely empty-handed.

The course was really easy, particularly the route choices between controls 7.-10., which were

ridiculous. There were only 3 runners who managed to run less than 8' (Hewi, me and Rino) and we took the podium places in M16/18.



Polish Championships in Long Distance Orienteering

I woke up... I felt I was unbelievably hot... On the other hand, I was shivering... I had a sore throat... I was coughing all the time... I had a running nose... Was it enough to stop dreaming about the medal this day? I thought so!

My only desire was to finish that tiring course of almost 12km and possibly got a diploma for the 5th or 6th place. The whole race went really quickly as it was very exciting and full of gripping action in the forest all the time.

The first control was set on the path fork - easy? Forget! There were so many small paths there, I was sure I got lost... but I saw a man from the M35 class (he had the same course and started 2' ahead of me) looking for the first control and suddenly getting ready to punch it. I was saved!

The next controls went really fluently, although I was a little bit afraid of the tricky control no. 2.

On my way to the 5th control I saw Zielu, who shouted to me: 'Podzio, there is Rino [started 3 minutes ahead of me] over there! They haven't found it yet!'. I got a bit excited but had to keep my temper not to get totally lost. I saw the control, punched it, started running to the next one and... saw Rino some 100m from the control and told him where the point was.

As I made a fairly considerable mistake at control no. 6, Rino caught me at the 8th control. The rest of the course we went together and co-operated quite well, I think. We passed lots of runners from our class.

On our way to the 10th control Rino threw away his map foil because it got brighter and thought it was not going to rain again...

While we were passing the huge field, it was raining cats and dogs and just after the 16th control Rino said to me quietly: 'Podzio, you have to control the map by your own. Mine doesn't exist...'.

I tried to do my best but my brain wasn't that fresh then and I made a huge mistake at the next control. Unfortunately, Rino ended just some 29sec out of the podium and I felt quite sorry for that fact...



Now I am ill but enormously happy!