Feb 26, 2017

Last Czech Ski-O Weekend - mistakes do not pay off

Last two Czech races of this season were held at Praděd. They were supposed to be at Nová ves u Rýmařova but super warm weather (up till +16°C!!!!) and heavy rains made the terrain perfect for summer o-races. I wasn't so excited about this area change as I really like the terrain at Nová Ves. In comparism, Praděd area doesn't offer technically difficult area, just lot of skiing and big climbing (Praděd is the highest point ofMoravia - the easter part of the Czech Republic).

My unlucky weekend started already on Saturday morning when I realized all my racing skis are already in Brno ready for World Championship. So I had to improvize. Not a best preparation for the Czech long distance Championship.

When I got a map, I was really dissapointed. The course was as easy as I expected. I know this is not a professional attitude, but I wasn't in a mood for this race at all. I had to persuade myself all the way to push and race. I have to admit, the race was a bit more interesting as it was great conditions for shortcuts. They made the race more interesting. I found some inside motivation and managed to push hard in that 3km long constant uphill to the 10th control point. But after that I "zakyselila jsem se" and made some big mistakes. Unfortunately, the map was not very correct in this area (considered by more athletes). I was 40sec behind 2nd position at 10th control and more than 3min ahead of 4th girl. But yeah, race ends in the finnish and I was 4seconds behind medals. Not a good day. I am glad Katka Neumannová came those 4seconds ahead of me because I definitely didn't deserve to win a medal this day. On Sunday, it was a last Czech cup race - middle distance. I was much more excited than previous day. I expected a very nice and technical race with lot of shortcuts=lot of mistake options. I did a very good till 9th control point currently leading with XY seconds. But I didn't go carefully enough to the 10th and got lost in the shortcuts. It was really hard to find myself as it was impossible to recognize, which tracks are on the map and which are shortcuts (later on, I found out all of them were shortcuts - in this case "got-lost-cuts"). Most of the runners got lost in this area. Other national team runner from my class made a mistake to the 5th control which was also located in this area. After that I injured my eye a little bit. I didn't see clearly with that eye and I did some small mistakes.

It came to surprise I was 3rd with only 2minutes to the best one. But as we talked later on, everybody did mistake in that get-lost-cuts area. Unfortunately, my mistake was most long time taking.