Stephanie Mach: a look back at the 2024 autumn races

6 October 2024: Canicross Panda Plus

Our first “training” race of this year’s autumn season, one we mainly wanted to enjoy. The route was 4 km long with 60 m of elevation gain, so it wasn’t exactly flat. The first 2 km were a steady, gentle climb, then came a flat stretch along the top, and then we ran gently downhill again to the finish.

Unfortunately, a few days before the race I wasn’t feeling quite well, so physically I wasn’t at my full 100%. But Ante always helps me a lot when we run, and of course he didn’t let me down this time either. On his side it was once again start to finish on a fully taut line. He pulled me up the hill beautifully the whole way, flew through every turn like the wind without a single mistake, and overtook in style. We managed to run the 4 km route in 14:07 minutes, which in the end was enough for a lovely second place. After the finish Ante enjoyed the podium and a super snack in the form of a Farm Fresh can! Thank you. :)

20 October 2024: O-SEE Canicross

The second race of this season wasn’t really in the plan, but because the weather was gorgeous, I decided to run the German O-SEE Canicross a week before the Czech Championship. O-SEE is otherwise an organisation that mainly puts on trail runs for humans, and on this date it also had a short canicross race added to the programme, over 3 km and 6 km. Because the Czech Championship route is 3.1 km, the choice of distance was clear – 3 km. This race had more climbing than anything we had run so far this year, but even so, the 100 m of climbing from the start didn’t put me off. What’s more, the race was held in a national park, so the countryside around was beautiful. The race base even had a good-sized stream where Ante could cool off both before and after the race, which is often missing.

We were the very first to start the race, so there was no overtaking. Ante’s pulling was absolutely flawless, and he galloped all the way up the 1 km hill with its 100 m climb without even thinking of dropping into a trot. We then enjoyed the descent, nice and relaxed. It was only me who, near the end, in the last 600 m before the finish, caught my foot on a stump or a big rock, so the fall that followed was really hard and nasty. Luckily I somehow managed to get running again despite a lot of pain in my ankle. My apologies to Ante that we didn’t really get to enjoy the final sprint. But despite this unpleasant experience, we grabbed a brilliant 1st place!

I also have to mention that otherwise the race had a really lovely atmosphere, everything ran in a calm and very relaxed way, and it definitely wasn’t our last trail race. ;)

More about Stephanie and Antaios on the Stephanie Mach page.