O-festivalen

Finally a good race this year!

I was confident with my orienteering technic before O-festivalen because I did really good O-trainings in front. The beginning of the week was good with 2 technic training per day with François and Thierry. Anyway, I had big troubles on World Cup middle distance. I was running too slow and making too many mistakes. It seams taht my expectations are too high and push me to take too much risks. It was a lot of opportunity on this race to make a top 10 which is what I can expected the best from me right now. But I am looking for better results and I try to get this perfect race/shape to rich it. It seams to be the wrong tactic. So far...

The long was just a good training to built self confidence again. I knew it was too long for me, specially regarding WOC preparation. I am going to run Sprint, Middle and Relay at WOC so, I need to be fresh this week to train really hard. The part I ran on the long was going well. I was feeling much better than the day before.

Finally a real good race on the relay. We are back on the very top with KOK. We did 4 very solide races. Jostein, John and Baptiste did a great job after my first leg. It is the race standard we are expecting to rich at Tiomila and Jukola in order to be in front. Definatly, John should ran Tio and Juko with us. Come on John!!! So, self confidence is much better now and I am looking forward to the next 3 weeks of good training until WOC. WOC relay is my main goal this year.

Maps and routes from O-festivalen
Results from O-festivalen
World cup page

CFC and Jukola

10 days ago, I was taking part to the French Club Championship organisation. After EOC, I spent most of my time working on this organisation. The organising club was NOSE fom Saint Etienne. I was involved in this organisation for a long time, almost a year. My work was mostly communication and animation, as speaker together with Thibaut Magne. We tried to make it as a little Jukola. our expectations were high and I can say, we did it good. Of course, it was some small problems but we made the competition very nice and the arena was nice built to follow the battle between the best clubs. Unluckly, we had an extremly bad weather which affected the competitor's feeling.

I was extremly tired after this organising WE while sleeping only 2-3h 3 nights in a row. I had to sleep almost the all week in order to get in cheap for Jukola. My training has been affected by this and I can say now, that it was not professionnal to not sleep enough during CFC WE. I was too much involved in this to be clever enough about resting.

KOK'er were meeting on Wednesday afternoon in Tampere. We had to drive 1h to get to the accomodation. It was a nice place just north of one training map. As we won Tiomila, we were expecting to rich top 3. We were focusing pretty much on our own. I was feeling good with the team spirit. It was a little more stressfull than at Tiomila. I think we were too much thinking that we could win. I havn't run extremly well. After my run, I thought I did well but in fact I was missing more than 1,5 min on control 6 because I lost my direction and I struggled to get back on the right direction. I found some tracks that I followed but they were not the one maped. It was new tracks from Jukola runners. I didn't noticed it and lost to much time there. It seams than only Holger ran well enough to close the gap to the leading teams. I think Baptiste and me could have run better (3-4min each) which means giving Daniel apportunity to make a better team result. As usual, loosing so much time on first leg was making trouble on other runners performances. Most of us didn't run our real level. It was possible to run better and close some gap to the lead. We have to improve our fighting spirit on bad situation. But meaning better technical performances and not taking any extra risk.



GPS Tracking
Results

Let see if French football team can qualify on a very bad situation and show us that we can alway believe...

Coming next is world cup in Oslo. We are already there and training on very nice maps and terrains. Always nice to be in Norway, specially when it is nice weather like today.

KOK's blog
Daniel's blog
Baptiste's blog

EOC Relay

It was a tight competition as we expected between the 6-8 best teams. The Russians and Swiss were also as expected the strongest teams. For our team, it is not good enough to make us happy. We did each one of us 1 min mistake. It is not much on this technical terrain but enough to be out of the podium. Our goal was clearly the gold. In order to make it, we need the 2 first legs to be the best possible. We can't expect Thierry to win with more than 2 minutes gap to the leading teams before he starts. The good point is that we manage to fight for the victory the all way. It is a long time ago now, we haven't been so close. Actually, our last good relay was EOC 2 years ago (2nd). The last 2 relays at WOC 2006-2007 were not very good. It seems we are back in business. It is good for WOC relay.

I was running first leg which is not usual for us. We had 17 relays (at WOC, EOC, WC) with the same team and the same order, last few years. We changed today because we wanted more flexibility in our team. Also, young guys (Philippe and Vincent) were running good on 2nd team. It is promising for future of our team. We need more than 3 guys able to run the relay.

It went well for me. I started as planed, very carefully on the sand dunes area. I was well focus all the way and try not to overspeed. It was not easy to do it, because I had quite long forking. So, I decided not to focus on this and make my own race. Afterwords, it seams I should have speed up a little to close the gap to the Swiss (Baptiste) and the Russian before spectator's control. The last loop was challenging orienteering. I manage it well until the pre-warning. Then, I lost focusing and map contact. I was very narrow minded when coming to the 18th control area. I didn't expect the area to look like this and I had to relocate which cost me about 1 min. It was a pity making a mistake here because I was 1 min from the front group at finish.

I expected more mistakes from the other teams because I though it was quite challenging specially at full speed. But the teams were very close from each other like in Ukraine last year (5 teams in 2min23sec).

EOC relay results

Coming next WE is organizing French club championship in Saint-Etienne and then Jukola/O-festival. It will be pretty important now to train well the next weeks and to get some competition trainings with full speed in France in order to get good feeling with WOC terrain. We are lucky to have WOC similar terrains in Saint-Etienne. I won't travel to Tchec republic before WOC.