Relais de Pentecôte, smoky races!

This weekend we raced the Pentecost relay, which is maybe the most traditional relay in Switzerland. It is a 7 leg relay. The format of the race is that the two first legs take part during the night of Saturday (start at 21:00), than the 5 morning runners take over with the start around 8 o’clock.
The race is always situated in the most hidden places of Switzerland, where only the basic supplies are provided… water. Every club builds its tent camp around a fire… and with 90 teams, this gives a lot of fires. All the cooking is made on the fire… at least for the real Pentecost relay runners… and the main meal is of course steaks and sausages.

So, besides that the race was situated at an honorable 1700m, hypoxia was trained thanks to the tons of CO liters inhaled before the race.

But fortunately the first half of the race was downhill, so that one could flee from its own smoke smell. That was also my motivation to start like a rocket, besides the fact that I had some places to catch up.

The terrain was mostly really fast, open forest with interesting features. But there was quite a bit of contrast… a dense, slow and technical part from the controls 11 through 18 and some mountain orienteering passages like between 9-11 and 18-25. The leg 9-10 is one potential reason for my sore legs this morning.

I had a quite clean race, a little bit boring to talk about. Since I haven’t orienteered against competitors, I was quite curious how I would do against others. Well, I am very pleased to see that my O shape seems to be good. I had the best time on my relay with 1h12. Fabian Hertner was 2nd 4’22’’ behind. But it must be said that Fabian had a comfortable lead… and I had to catch up people.
I started 4th and finished 2nd. A good result for our club, but I am sure if Baptiste could have come we would have been quite a bit stronger… hopefully next year we can align all our best club members.


Here my course... on 3 scanned samples:






















Actually, a detail of the map doesn’t come through the scanning… the smell of smoked sausage.





































After the race, I did my cool down running up the Pierre Avoi:



Quite a breath taking cool down, 800m of climb and no loss for stunning scenery. This cool down is the other potential reason for my sore legs… especially because I was quite dehydrated.