On Saturday the race for the 2010 Italian championship medals was opened. Sprint championships where held on Saturday while on Sunday it was time for a national competition on long distance. I traveled to Monghidoro near Bologna knowing that my preparation was not appropriate for a sprint since I had done just a single fast track training since last December. Nevertheless I succeeded in doing a good sprint race. Just a few seconds of mistakes,  maybe not the optimal route choice to nr 14 but good last controls. In the end I finished 6th, 42 seconds down on winning Martin Hubman and 34 on new Italian Sprint Champion Giancarlo Simion. Of course not happy with the result,  but happy with my race.

Sundays long distance was a quite particular race. Because of the snow fallen in the early morning the organizers decided to delay the start by two hours.  When I started my race at 14:33 the forest was still covered by 5 cm of snow. It was a hard race. The snow and the steep terrain made it hard to run fast without the risk of falling (I stopped counting after the 5th time I kissed the snow). Even technically the race seemed to be more difficult. No tracks in the snow helping you finding the controls but rather going crisscross all the time. I did some mistakes but had a rather solid race. So I finished 2nd less than 1 minute from Martin who won again.

Now it is time for hard training. An I am finally able to do so. On Friday I will fly to Sweden for 2 weeks of training and 10mila preparation.

Maps: sprint, long distance

some pictures ...