Training Log Archive: BorisGr

Warm-up and a quick cool-down in the rain.

District Relay Champs
I ran for OK Linne's 5th Team. The relay consisted of three legs, and there were just 17 teams entered in the H21 division, 8 of them from Linne. In the non-stop driving rain, my lead-off runner Mattias Karlsson had a solid run and came in 6th, 9 minutes down on the lead (Linne's 3rd team) and 6 minutes behind the first team. Everyone told me that this was a very technical area, so the motto for the race was "avoid disasters", and I managed that reasonably well. I lost some time on a long leg, where i kept zig-zagging on a bearing and had trouble going straight for a while, and then made a parallel error near the control itself, but not many mistakes otherwise - maybe 3-4 minutes lost out there. Bjorn, who ran for the 4th team, caught me near the end, and we stayed together, sprinting it out to the finish. We came in 5th and 6th, having passed a team from another club. I ended up with the 5th best time on the leg, but a good 12 minutes behind Tomas Stenstrom's awesome run (he won the leg by 5 minutes) that put Linne 1 in the lead for good. Still, i was pretty happy with the race, especially since this was my third straight race in Sweden without any major mistakes. Must be a good sign. The results are at http://www.ifthor.se/orientering/arrangemang/dm06s...

So, since Linne is the largest club in the district of Uppland in terms of its elite group, it tends to do very well at the District Relay Champs from year to year, normall taking at least 3 of the top 4 spots on both the men's and women's sides.
This makes picking teams for the district champs an interesting question. Do you stack your top team to make sure it wins and dominates? Or do you make several even teams to make the competition more interesting, making it into sort of a within-club relay champs (you could go all out here by seeding your own runners and picking a bunch of even teams)?
Now, the Linne team selection on the men's side is done separately from the women's. On the women's side, it was decided to go with two relatively even "best teams", with the club's 1st, 2nd, and 6th runners on Team 1, and 3rd, 4th, and 5th on Team 2. As a result, Linne's Team 2 won, with Team 1 finishing second, ahead of IF Thor's first team. On the men's side, however, there was a clear pecking order, with the best team being made of the 3 best runners at the moment, the 2nd team of the next best 3, and so on. And, the top 5 teams (the competitive ones) finished in order as planned, without too much possibility for "promotion" (although team 3 did lead after 1 leg). I asked Mats if it was really fun to have the first team dominate, and why not have the "egalitarian team selection" instead. He said it should be an honor to be on the first team, and something people should be striving for. I thought that was a cool viewpoint, and also that it was interesting to see the contrast between the two philosophies right there, which is why i am writing all this.... I don't know if i have a strong opinion in either direction here, but i wonder if some people do have preferences one way or the other.

C • relay teams question 10

The map from Saturday's District Middle Champs, with Micke Nordstrom's routes, is at http://www.mikaelnordstrom.se/maps/dmMedel06.jpg