LifeInLine - Michalovce 2010

Just one week after Prievidza we were attending another race in the LifeInline series, this time in Michalovce, in the Eastern far end of Slovakia. This time only Peter and me were able to travel from our club so I've invited SSz and FT to join us in the car. We spent the night in the flood-hit area of Satoraljaujhely - the flood was gone but many signs of it were still left everywhere, especially in smaller villages or rural areas.

Waking up Sunday morning I heard a sound that grasped me with fear. Wind - heavy wind. Now that was something completely lacking from the meteo forecasts. By the sound of it is was about 15km/h with strong gusts. Anyway we packed in the car and had a painfully slow car drive to Michalovce - about 50km but took us more than 1 hour to get there. It was quite hard to find a parking place near the event but after two rounds in town we decided to park the car in a plaza parking place and walk 400m.
We built our small 'camp' on the side of the road, just beneath some big trees, as - in spite of the wind - it was totally sunny and hot.

The race route itself was a 1.010m long triangle-like route around a small park, asphalt was OK, patches marked as usual. On the back-leg we were given 1 closed lane from a 4-6 lane motorway, while the start/finish straight was a 4-lane road totally closed. The most tricky parts were the end of the start straight with a small ascending turn up the motorway and the start of the finish straight where there were numerous surface errors so you had to plan your way ahead.

Race track

The wind was blowing hard when Peter's race started. The field was smaller than in the previous week and he gained a 15m lead by the time they were to turn left to the motorway. Then I lost his sight behind the trees but when I saw him again on the end of the backstraight he was leading with a comfortable 50-60m. Then he zoomed down the next 2 turns and crossed the finish line with 12 seconds' advantage. He was very tired though and complained about the strong winds.

Peter 20m from the finish

photo (C) J. Meriac http://jaminline.rajce.idnes.cz

Then we saw FT racing in the 5km race. He is in base-building period for the shorttrack season so while he could easily skate with the others and had no difficulty with the tempo, he surely lacked sprinting speed and couldn't attack for real in the last lap. Nevertheless he earned 3rd place and said it was a good warm-up for the 21km.

FT in 3rd place

photo (C) J. Meriac http://jaminline.rajce.idnes.cz

Then after the 10k race came the half marathon, 21 laps to cover. FT decided to start there, too. SSz and me positioned ourselves perfectly in the starting field (read: rolled to the last line) and at 14:30 we started.

I was quite happy to find IC from Presov, Slovakia and travel in his draft for the first 7 laps. The 7th lap was for some reason 20 sec faster than the previous ones and I immediately felt tired. So in the finish lane I dropped from IC's draft and from then on it was pure hell. Alone against the strong winds (nice memories from Bratislava...) - and by this time the finish straight was having wind from the side, not from behind. So it meant that you: tempo all along the higway section in headwind, turn left and roll some in the relative wind-free small straight, then you drop onto the finish straight and meet some wind here, too. 

By the 12th lap I was seriously considering giving up the race and sit down next to Peter, who was acting as a photographer in the finish straight. But then came lap #14 and I thought "hey only 7 is left which is almost equal to 1 lap on the route where I practice usually..." So I started to convince myself and in the end it paid off.

In the final 4 laps I was able to catch two elder guys and sit in their draft again. This was a real life-saver and I did not think much about the aesthetics of drafting all the way to the finish. I came in in 59:12 which is seriously worse than last week's result but this time I had to fight the winds alone for quite some time, unlike last week. SSz finished some 2 minutes ahead while her son FT skated a 42:44, that is quite a good one if you are in base-building period IMHO.
IR from Tatabanya has won this race! This is his first win in this series and he was obviously very happy with that. He told us the leading group wasn't driving a fast tempo so he could sprint away from them in the last few hundred meters, using his good technique in the last 2 turns. He won by 10 meters ahead of a Czech and a Pole guy.

IR finishing

Travelling home was a quite uneventful 5-hour drive. I had some time to think about and re-live the race. Main mistake was dropping from draft - it would be so much easier to cover the distance if I could just stay there. Lesson learned (again).
Results here.

Intersport Tour de Tisza-tó 2010

This "tour" is a 57-km ride around the Tisza lake, which is an artifical lake and also a natural park. It's completely flat around there so you won't need to climb any hills or roll down slopes. And it is called a tour, as - while some bike pros are racing hard - the main aim is to get people moving and make them cover the distance either on bikes or skates. This tour-ness is what greatly describes the friendly attitude of the event.

We have travelled there by 2 cars, 3 bikers and 4 skaters. The drive was rather uneventful as SSz and FT spent most of the time asleep and Feri spent the time fighting the GPS that seemed to decide 3 satellites are too much :) We got to Tiszafüred quite early, registered and drove some more, as the skaters started from near Poroszló, 8km from the start of the cyclists. We parked the car and had some lazy time, then put up our skates and began waiting for the cyclist.
And there they came, all 1000 of them. Young & aged, racers or tourists, on many types of bikes, we saw even a velociped, a handbike and many many kids, too. After they have gone, we had to stop by a line and an organizer started us, syncing the start with the chip timing system via radio comms. We were about 15 at the start line, later it turned out there were yet more who arrived bit late.
So we started and as there was a light breeze from behind we had quite an easy and comfortable ride southwards. Feri has dropped in the first few km, in fact I didn't even notice as I wasn't looking back - it was such an easy ride I did not think he would drop :( So we rolled on with SSz, as FT and the 'more advanced ones' from Budapest has started out so much faster we lost their sight within minutes. We changed lead in about each 4-5 km for the first 20 kms. RT was following us closely, we talked a bit and agreed to stay together as there would be headwind on the way back.
Apart from the ambulance dealing with injured cyclists every 5 km this part was quite uneventful - nice clean and smooth asphalt on the top of the dike, lake to the left, trees to the right. I kept on eating some glucose every 15 minutes and swallowed a magic energy gel after 1 hour. Then we arrived to the dam near Kisköre where there was a refreshing station (water only) and some concrete surface. SSz and myself eased up a bit, stretching our backs but RT kept on skating the same speed and disappeared quickly. We thought we would catch up with him later but that never happened...
Then we had to climb up the dam, cross it (no big problem, but had to care for the dilating elements) and then came about 2-300m of really bad surface rolling down from the dam, where the safest method was to skate right at the edge of the concrete, almost in the dust. Well that did not do any good to my knees and the left one began to hurt a bit. After that it was a nice ride again eastwards but we knew something bad was still ahead.
And there it was, after 31 km, near Abádszalók. There were 3 kinds of cracked asphalt (bad, worse and even more worse), patched on each other in random order so you had to take every step with caution. I couldn't push a normal push sideways, I was 'tiptoeing' for the next 2 km. This part of the route was tough, mainly for the brain, exhaustive with constant awareness.
From km 35 it was smooth again, but turning North we met some headwind now. Luckily we could use a cyclist to rest behind him for some time, and according to his meter we were travelling by 25 km/h. Both SSz and me were happy with that as we knew this was a really big plus for us. Sadly enough I forgot to eat properly during the rough part and following the cyclist, so all of a sudden, right after 2 hours, all my power was lost, I couldn't even rest there. So I told SSz to go on with the cyclist and I pulled out.
There was about 15 km left - I ate some glucose, consumed another energy gel and tried to get in some rhythm, but I wasn't feeling good. Then I saw OB sitting in the grass (he was travelling with the 'pros' from the beginning), asked him what was wrong but he told me to go on, as he was only waiting for his support cyclist to get him some water. Murphy hit again: after only a few kilometers there was the next watering station (at km 48 or so) where I stopped for a glass of water but then continued without rest. Then came the 'low hit', there were some gravel on the road after about 500m, and I did not notice it in time, caught a stone and couldn't avoid falling. It was no big deal but there was blood on my right knee and my left hip also hurt, though I did not see anything on it from a quick glimpse.
2 cyclists came past me just then, one of them asked if I was OK and I managed to get in their draft. I was suffering badly and didn't have power to skate properly, so I rested there for a bit. I tired to speed up and left them 3 times but failed and slowed down again. Then OB came past me in the draft of his support cyclist, yelled at me to jump over there but I simply couldn't :(
No problem, there were only 5 km left - but what a 5 km. I thought they would go down fast but it was horribly slow how they passed. I've managed to get away from the bikers and skated alone the last 5 but it felt incredibly slow. However I arrived to Tiszafüred at last and crossed the finish line after some zig-zag, in 2:48:05.
I felt completely empty. I rolled to the water, drank some, got rid of my skates and sat there for 5mins. Then phoned home to tell Aniko I was still alive, then sat there again for 5 mins, listening to the speaker announcing the cyclists in the ceremony. After some time I managed to get on my feet and walked to the podium to meet SSz and the other skaters already there. Friendly talk, etc, socializing. Then we saw Feri arrive, just a bit above 3 hours.
Then I caught a ride in a complete stranger's car back to my own car (8 km from the finish line, remember) and during that a heavy thunderstorm hit us. So I was completely soaked when I got in my car, drove back to Tiszafüred and when the storm has gone, we packed up and started driving home. And we felt really grateful that the storm did not come 1 hour earlier :) During the drive - guess what - SSz and FT were asleep for most of the time...
Interestingly I did not feel tired the day after, only felt a little muscle burn. So by Monday I was thinking where to go skating.

Looking back to the event, it was surely fun. Organizers deserve a big bravo, everything was OK. I've never covered such a distance on skates before and I clearly hit some inner barrier at 2 hours, but I want to register for next year's tour again ASAP. It simply felt good skating there!

Supermarathon

There was a 56-km running event held nearby, called 'Homokháti Szupermarathon'. The small villages and towns wee bit west of Szeged are commonly called 'Homokhát', means 'sandy part' or something like that.

I was not insane enough to cover that distance by myself so we entered the relay. We were 3 in the team (called 'Kiribati Turbo 608'), and there were 5 etaps to go, so Feri did the first (7 km) and the third one (12 km), myself the 2nd (13 km) and the 5th (7 km), Szilvi had one distance to go (15 km). The main difficulty of the race was not the distances but the road surfaces. Etaps #1, #3 and #5 were quite rough, someone called it a hazelnut choc...
Weather was fine if you like windy overcast 10C, after a rain... there were a lot of runners and hurdes of schoolkids running a 1km distance. We've met some skaters from Budapest, from Kori2000 and had a nice chat with them. They opted for skating the whole distance, but as a pleasure run, not as a race.

Well we left Feri behind for the start and drove to the first relay point and waited quite a lot. It turned out the start procedure was repeated for some reason so everything was postponed half an hour :) Anyway Feri arrived at some time and then came my 13 km. The first 2 kms were very rough & tough: headwind, bad surface, even wet at some point. But then the asphalt turned quite smooth and after a big turn westwards headwind wasn't a factor anymore. I tried to catch up with a guy skating about 300m ahead of me but with no success, in fact the gap has remained the same by the end of my etap. My back was aching badly after 20 minutes but... I've reached the next checkpoint and it was Feri's turn again.
Quick drive up to the next meeting point and talking to Feri meanwhile, he suffered very much on the rough asphalt. He turned up at some point though and Szilvi started. We drove to the last meeting point - and then disaster came.
The race route was a loop, like a lasso - the first and last distance were the same route but opposite direction. We were waiting and waiting and then decided something has happened to Szilvi. Feri got in the car and went off searching for her. Later it turned out she missed a crucial turn and got lost. Feri found her though sometime later, she must have covered 10 extra kms by then... Anyway she got to the meeting point and I was on my way to finish. Though the asphalt was rough still I quite enjoyed this second distance, and during the last 3 kms I was quite happy, skating smooth style with big strong sidepush and nice recovery. I was really having fun then.
Crossing the finish, line Szilvi and Feri were waiting for me there and we were given a gift package each. There was no prize for the skate relays but that's no problem.
I've checked the race times and I was over 20km/h - hooraaaay!

3 kids of the club were also doing a relay, namely Petra (10), Balázs (16), Marci (10, Feri's son). They handled it professionally, but they also had trouble on the 3rd part. Balázs covered distances 1,3 and 5, while Marci ran the 2nd and Petra the 4th. When I asked them after the race, they were not tired at all!
Some photos of big numbers of crazy runners and small numbers of crazy skaters here.

After all, it was a pleasant ride (minus Szilvi getting lost) and we may do it again next year, but I think we could do it as individuals. Now do I sound insane? :D