Day 39 / 326 to go

Believe it or not, but the whole day I was somewhat excited to have a training session in the evening! Indeed, I was looking forward to it and I caught myself a few times wondering what I should do (opening? or endgame? or practise my PAT?)...  8-)

I consider this to be a very good sign. Actually, for two reasons:

• my bad performance during the Wunsiedel Open did not surpress my motivation
• the absence of training or at least the considerable reduction in training during the last two weeks (based on my participation in two tournaments) makes me miss something I (obviously) like doing!

Ok ok, after some travel early this morning and a hard day´s work, my motivation simply has to fight a bit with some sort of fatique. Nevertheless, I spent the obligatory hour on practising my PAT. (BTW: Although I performed pretty bad in my latest tournament, I finally managed to include my PAT more often and somewhat more "regular". So the "PAT-thinking process" is finally kicking in...)
The following position (my fore-last for today; together with the last I did today) was an eye-opener; white to move:

The piece to move is rather obvious and there are - at least for me - two possible squares to head for. (The bishop could move to d2 and head for c3 or go via e3 and land on c5 - with the support of the b4-pawn.) But which one is the better one? Well, to be very honest, I simply answered this question prosaically, i.e. without any sort of concrete calculation/variation in mind, but by means of some "smart sounding buzzwords" convincingly whispered to myself!      A big mistake!
So from now on, even when the puzzle to solve may only ask for the very next move, my considerations have to include a concrete - and most important a decent - variation!

In addition, I did a one lesson (of slightly less than one hour) on basic endgame principles in de la Villa´s book; with a decent amount of time spent on simply doing a recap on stuff I did some weeks ago...