Sinusoid. It's all in your head.

Fortunately, my good health let me execute all the plans presented in the last note.

My last winter training camp in Szklarska Poręba in the middle of February was expected to be quite tough. And it really was. I managed to do 21 trainings during 9 days (3 of which were technical sessions).

At the end of February my club made his way to Żelazko in order to spend some time with a map in our hands. At the weekend I got the opportunity to run 4 technical trainings (using even 5 maps, in fact). I had a really good flow and my orienteering technique was quite promising.

Then, the highlight of this training period - Portugal!

After arrival in Crato we spent 2 days training on the model event maps for Portugal 'O' Meeting 2011.

The competition itself was a great success for me. I managed to win both middle distance races and place 3rd and 2nd in long ones. In the overall classification I gained the 1st place ahead of Jan Petrzela (CZE) and Olej. It was unbelievably satisfying and boosting to defeat the previous European Youth Orienteering Champion. I felt that everything is on the right way!

Afterwards, we trained for some 3 days in a bit different terrains and prepared for the coming competition - International Meeting of Arraiolos.

Despite making some silly mistakes, I managed to win the middle distance again. Nevertheless, I had no mental power for the last day - long distance of 13,7km. At the first 4 controls I lost a total of 11 minutes! 5 of them already at the 1st one... And the rest of the course I jogged. At the end I remembered about my bet with Olej concerning the finish. Although it was very muddy, I decided to run the last 300m as fast as possible and... won this split with the advantage of 5 seconds over the next competitor (not only in my class, but in all competition classes). Funny;)

One week later I took part in the popular cross-test in Ruda Pabianicka. I achieved the time of 28:58 on the course of 8,08km (3:35/km). Looking at my last year's result, it was 51 seconds better! However, Olej was really fast that day and beat me by 27 seconds - congratulations and recover!

Last weekend I took part in the Danish competition, which is considered as the opening of the orienteering season - Spring Cup. The night relay on Friday was a real fun for me and I enjoyed the mass start very much. Nonetheless, the most important race for me was Saturday's classic. Generally, I made an awful performance and lost as many as 6mins due to my mistakes! It wouldn't have been that bad, if I hadn't lost more than 10 minutes to the winner - Eskil Kinneberg from Norway. In my opinion, he is the best junior right now, but losing so much time is not acceptable! I must have had a really bad day...
This painful failure made me lose my motivation, self-confidence and belief completely. That's why I had no fun running the 1st leg of Sunday's relay and came 7 minutes behind the leading group (making no more than 1min of mistakes!).

My mental state during the last days was so poor that I wasn't able to find any motivation for running and my life was so dull... I don't mean that I avoided trainings. I did them, but with no commitment and willingness. On Wednesday I was close to tears when I finished almost all the intervalls behind the runners who are actually not faster than me. At the same day I had a long talk with Łukasz and it must have helped me really a lot, because - although the beginning of my Thursday's training wasn't good - I managed to overcome my problems and ran with a huge smile on my face!

THANK YOU, ŁUKASZ.