The coolness and peacefulness of the hotel room feels odd and new. At the same time it feels I am missing something and that I "have it all". Pretty nice feeling! Training-camp with my high-school youngters and the training-camp-integrated World Cup races in Spain was quite a hectic package. But I have got so used to the daily coaching that I couldn't really imagine better preparation than it was before the Murcia World Cup races - thanks to the great group!
Lets get back to this hotel room. Today I did model event for the finals and got some important massage. Even recovery from the weekend seems to obey nice schedule, if someone would have made any schedule. In fact, I feel I am now really relaxing, and it feels just great! Soon the races will offer some stress for the mind & body, but now it is time to live this day and moment and share my naive stories here on my homepage ;-).
My races start on Thursday with middle qualification, followed by long qualification on Friday. It seems that you need to run rather fast already in the qualifications, if you want to be close to the top. It also seems, that you need to be close to the top to run well in the finals, as there will be tracks. On the weekend I will in any case rest - and hopefully relax too - and follow the sprint races. The start of the next week will be rough: all the finals in a row on MON-WED (7,9km, 20,6km and 7,3-7,6km). After that I will notice that it is a wise decision to spend the Easter in Central Finland and not competing in Southern Finland...
Kuva: Karo Ukskoski
In the last weekend races I started to get some really positive signs in my orienteering performance. Especially the leading of the middle race feels good and those 13 legs I did well from the start, felt easy and fast. But I have still some steps to take, as we saw from the results. One key step is that I can't quit the race after I have realized that the perfect performance is not possible anymore. I should just remember that nobody is perfect, and on the other hand, nobody is a perfect loser too. You should just live in the present and enjoy that most of the things are running pretty damn good. This is the conclusion I have reached so far and with it I will go for these champinships to show some "muscle" ;-).
Kuva: Karo Ukskoski