MAPS
LONG DISTANCE
1st & 2nd LOOP:
RELAY:
COMPLETE RESULTS
Italian Long distance championship: 6th
This time there were everyone; no other international races in the same time, no one was injured, no one was missing: the best long distance runners were at the start of San Genesio’s Long distance championship, few kilometres far but 1000m above Bolzano. As the starting list was not extremely good, there weren't a lot of surprises in the final results, with the victory of the new-naturalized Italian runner Mikhail Mamleev before the two financiers Tavernaro and Rigoni. 6th place for me, in 1h38’, behind Negrello (U.S. Primiero, 4th) and Schgaguler (TOL, 5th) with Seppi (CUS Bologna), Corona (Esercito), Seidenari(Forestale) and Maddalena (Svizzera) completing the top ten.
My race: the course (14,1 km + 515m) was composed by two similar loops, with a map-change after 7,5km; my purpose, in a so long race, was looking for a quite perfect race under the technical view and try to avoid physics crisis to not compromise the relay of the next day, the main goal of the week-end for our team. The minutes before the start were troubled: an air bubble in my compass grown while I was running up to the pre-start and the control description I forget at the finish area (I started without it..) compromised part of my warm-up. Luckily I could find the right concentration shortly before the start trying to minimize the incidents.
As you can see in my race maps, during the race I didn’t make big mistakes; as I'm not very accustomed with 1:15000 maps, I was forced to make some little mistakes near the control (particularly, control 5 and 11 of both the loops) and often I was forced to slow down my speed to read carefully the map and to limits some bigger mistakes (like in the 2nd control of the race).
The first loop was surely the most suitable for my characteristics, with a lot of controls (never simply) that asked the maximum attention and there wasn’t a pure running leg; I made the biggest mistake at the 9th control, when I found a big stone in the slope among ferns that forced me to searching the flag some dozens of meters before the control, before I could realize that that stone wasn’t mapped.
In the second loop, quite involuntarily, I started to think at the relay of the next day, and also in the easier legs I didn’t put my speed up to 100%. Whit the hindsight, it’s good the way it went.
