The list of 16 whizz-kids announced!

Now we officially know who is going to attend European Youth Orienteering Championships 2008 in Switzerland (9-12th October) to represent Polish Youth Team. Check!
It is amazing that as much as 3 competitors are from my club. Undoubtedly, it's going to be a very nice stay with them and the rest of our wonderful and harmonious team :-)

As far as the decision to take 5 runners from my class (M18) is concerned, I think it's very clever and well-considered because none of us (Slavko, Drągu and me) was vastly outstanding during this season and each of us represented quite an equal level. Rino and Hewi took the first two places in the ranking of course.

There is also one more thing that delights me - the second trainer. It's going to be Kajo. Exactly two years ago I spent about 2 weeks on a sports camp in Hungary with him and it was not a waste of time in any case.


It seems to be the most appropriate time to refer to my pre-season goals. These were:

1. gold in an individual race (Polish Champs)
2. gold in relay (PC)
3. go for EYOC 2008.

Unfortunately, only the third one is really going to be fulfilled as the 2nd one was missed by only 5 seconds and instead of the 1st one I have one bronze and two silver PC medals in individual races.
Nevertheless, there appeared JWOC 2008 totally unexpectedly and now even if it's my very first time to take part in EYOC, I have already gained much more experience and you cannot name it debut!
Therefore, my expectations are quite high and I don't want to hide I dream about a medal from relay. However, there is no point in getting excited too much, I just have to do my job. I would like to start in long and sprint distance as well (of which I can't be sure as only 4 runners per class can perform in each distance).

On Friday I'm flying to Sweden to take part in Baltic Junior Cup. Then we're moving directly to Switzerland for some days of preparatory camp before the main aim of this journey - EYOC 2008.

I hope our whole team will make this EYOC a wonderful memory for life and great encouragement for the coming generations!

A short holiday summary

As I was ill and didn't attend school for the whole week, I had much time to complete my computer training diary at last. This year's summer holidays were entirely devoted to orienteering and the results of this hard work are really impressing;)

76 days

39 technical trainings

22 competition races

15 physical trainings

665,16km

which makes a perfect daily average of 8,75km!

...and much time spent on other sports (football, basketball, volleyball, table tennis, swimming, cycling, pool, 'The king', chess, cards and even Scrabble...).

Today I could have taken part at School Championships in Cross-Country Running for about 1,5km in my park. However, I think I had made a clever decision to attend a club training and slowly come back to my brilliant passion.

'Zaran, we're going for EYOC 2008!!!! hahahaha'

a so-called MIND-MAP

While I was sitting in front of my PC and getting bored more and more, I got to know that Finnish Champs in Middle Distance were held last Saturday. Nothing special, you'd say... but the thing Pasi Ikonen (the winner) published on his homepage is really worth seeing! It is a mind-map - not a map that you get just after your start but the one made by yourself with the objects you needed to find your way to each control.

I also attach the Matthias Merz's map (5th place - less than 2' behind) with his routes, just to compare and see how successful Pasi was.

Enjoy!

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!

6th night race in 3-week time

This was on Wednesday evening. We all gathered in a well-known bar and got ready for the last course before Polish Champs. The course setter was Pasza - that's why it was pretty difficult. The parameters were fairly similar to the today's night race coming in some 8 hours. My running time of exactly 56 minutes wasn't satisfying at all as I made lots of mistakes of about 12'! Furthermore, I didn't manage to find control no. 17 because there was one more same clearing there...



Thanks to this training session I am rich in important conclusions which are hopefully going to help me after 22:45 (it's my starting time for today's PC in Night-O). I am the last one to enter the forest!