4th National Event - Behême

... in which Fabien Pasquasy "took it easy" and won with a 17:51 gap to number 2.

As Fabien indicated, the area was "nice and tricky": the southern area of the map was unmapped before, and was a typical Ardennes style valley. The northern part of the map was already used for the Belgian Championship Long Distance in 2006 and had detailed vegetation, much like the maps used for the Belgian 3 days (also the JEC 2008 maps).

Both areas were difficult, as can be seen on Fabien's map.

As is fashionable these days, most runners received advice from their coaches before the race to start jogging as soon as a mistake was made, since the terrain was obviously too technical and when looking at the splits, it almost seems like everyone made a mistake towards control one, except for Fabien. Reality, of course, was slightly different. Even if you are able to run a good leg, Fabien invariably is 30 seconds faster. Even though most Flemish runners never trained better before than the previous months, everywhere Fabien takes one step, they need two. We are anxiously checking our spam folder for "leg enlargement" proposals, in vain.

Fabien was one of the last runners to start. After our race, we were discussing what time he would be able to run today and our conclusion was somewhere in the low 1h30's. When he arrived, we thought he ran only a small part of the race and took it easy on that part. Wrong.

The battle for the second place was more interesting and was eventually won by Christophe Bernard, who was 2,5 minutes faster than number 3, Jan Oeyen.

In the women's class, Greet Oeyen also confirmed that she's ready for WOC, since she was 7 minutes faster than Aline Hermans and Severine Vandermeulen.

• Results
• Splits
• Map HE

WOC-team News

Etienne Van Gasse has been injured for the last month. The national event was going to be a test to see if he was able to run normally again. It does not look that way. He might, however, still be able to run the sprint distance.