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Written by Klaus Schgaguler
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Tuesday, 23 March 2010 09:30 |
 The national Italian season started last weekend with a night-o competition with mass start and a very technical middle distance in southern Tuscany. Because of the long trip and my knee still not feeling fully recovered i decided just very late to take part. Even if my orienteering was just crap and the weather was cold and wet i think the trip was worth to be made.
But let's start from the beginning.
The map for the night competition was in scale 1:7500 but still very hard to read because of all the details. This in combination with mass start and dense fog made this first Italian cup a very special (and i think funny) race. The positions changed a lot during the butterflies but also during the longer legs. Almost everyone did some bigger mistakes. I passed first at the spectator control but missed a lot immediately after this in the stony overgrown forest to control 16. After this and some more time losses in the final butterfly i was surprised to be just some seconds behind Misha and Alessio on the way to 2nd last. I could gain some time on Alessio but he managed to pass the finish line just ahead of me and so i finished 3rd.
 Sundays middle distance let me feel like a beginner again. Map and course where nice but my orienteering was not. I did "smaller" mistakes already to number 1 and 2 but then a very big one to 3. It would take to much time to explain all the thing that went wrong on this leg, but after 10 min(!) of parallel mistake where i was completely lost on the edge of the map i found my way to number 3. It took me some time to reset my orienteering and start over again, but then i did a decent central part of the competition with some good splits. Just to mess it up again in the end where the concentration was completely lost. 18 min behind winning Misha, i hope i learned my lession. I will be ready for the next challenges.
Maps (click for full view):
 
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