Ø French-team training-camp in Asiago (Italy) for WOC 2014:
Last month
was the time to start to focus on the preparation of the next season with a
camp in world champs 2014 terrain: the main goal was to get a good idea of what
is waiting for us in some 10 month over-there. We can now say that we will be well
spoiled, and the camp-experiences was worthy! Indeed, without talking too long
of the beautiful landscape and the excellent pasta every meal, it seems that
the terrain of the competitions will be really interesting and quite
challenging. The route-choices will be especially significant and a good knowledge
of the steep terrain will be essential! Still some work to do…
Ø World Cup in Baden (Switzerland) :
For the last but not the least events of the
international season: Quite interesting competitions were waiting for us in a not
that typical Swiss forest thanks to a tricky hilly area full of big rocks, and
in the old nice city center of Baden where decisive route-choices had to be
taken. The atmosphere there was especially great as a large audience came to
cheer for some of their Swiss star taking part in their last international
competitions with the Swiss national-team colors.
For me, the performances were quite satisfying but it could still have
been better! (As it’s almost always the case in orienteering; but some times
more than others…). The long competitions season start to feel tiring (especially
mentally).
- Middle-distance: 15th
I did some good parts, but some precipitations
in the tricky area and bad route-choices cost me too much time to expect a good
result behind the tough Swiss armada. Looking the split-time, it seems that the
speed was not a major problem, but the orienteering had to be clean the whole
way!
(Result / GPS tracking)
- Sprint: 13th
My navigation went pretty well the whole course
and that something to be pleased with, but I unfortunately took some much
slower route-choices where I lost a lot of time especially in the stairs which
are generally terrible in sprint! That how the 1st control (right by
the stairs), the 12th (left tunnel), and the 14th (stairs
left) have been far too long for me. At the changing map, it was particularly wise
to stop when we got the new map just at the start triangle, and take the right
route-choice.
Finally,
I finish the overall world-cup as n°21st without competing the 3
first races in New-Zealand in January, with some up and down performances
during the NORT in June and with catastrophic underachievement at WOC. Nevertheless,
we can notice that a number of the best runners don’t compete for the overall world-cup.
Ø Park World Tour: China
Few
PWT races in China have been a perfect excuse for a new exploration in a new
continent for me, and I really think that the trip worth trying! It was even sometime
a little adventure when we didn’t know exactly what to expect and when. I can summarize
this great experience by some cultivating sightseeing, some exotic places and
food, living in comfortable enough hotels when we see the number of stars, far
too much time spent in the transports (but it went fine with cool people), a
lot of fun times with a nice cosmopolitan group, and even few quite interesting
orienteering event: For me, it went just good enough to make the trip
profitable thanks to few price-money.
Ø Swedish relays:
October
was also the time for the last large Scandinavian relays of the season in
Sweden. However, it did come as well as expected for my club OK Hällen as we
couldn’t be ranked at 25-manna due to a broken SI-stick despite good chances
for a good position top 10), and we even didn’t take the start of the Smålandskavlen due to a team decimate by injuries and sickness…
