Second half - a tough day

In football the first few minutes of the second half are critical if you are the leading team. The opposition are psyched up by their manager and will be raring to have a go at you. You need to sit tight, keep your focus and not concede.

Today felt the same, after yesterday's rest day and with 6 days to go, we knew the Czechs will come out all guns blazing. However we didnt need to take big risks and so with the forecast for weak conditions and early shut-off, we decided to start early.

As it turned out the conditions were better than we thought but our start time was not a big mistake. The Czechs did start 20 minutes after us and did win the day but by a small margin and they will need to take bigger risks to catch up unless we make big mistakes.

So for the day. It really was horrible flight, the climbs were extremly rough and narrow and my Libelle did not like it at all. I was having terrible time in the climbs and was getting out-climbs even by the weakest competitors. And climbing is normally my secret weapon, if all else fail at least i know i can outclimb people.

So i spent the whole flight 1000-1500 feet below everyone else trying to catch up. The reason i got a good result (third) was that i left the weak climbs even though i was lower than everyone. I didn't succumb to the temptation to take a few more turns in weak climbs in order to get to the safety of cloudbase.

So, played badly but still managed a good results. Fun factor 2, result factor 8.