Discussion: Rest your body!

Don't give up on WOC!!! You don't get many chances as it is...

Yes. Rest your body first, and see how it feels in a couple of days time before making any big decisions. Also, Skype chat if you want!

The past week you have been doing hard training and racing quite a bit! From experience, it's easy to feel a bit down after a period of hard training and lack of sleep. A break will help you recover both physically and mentally. Maybe take at least three easy days - one or two resting and one or two doing no more than some easy jogging <45min. Hopefully your body will be ready for more after that! If still in doubt, take an easy week, and then get back into it.

I don't actually know much about competition or preparation, but I would echo the consensus above: it can be difficult to make an informed decision while under stress. Take a break, rest and recover, and see how you feel then. It is an unfortunate reality that amid training and competition, life happens - we don't have the luxury of being able to concentrate on orienteering to the exclusion of all else.

You worked for and earned a chance to compete at the World Championships. That's huge; it's an extraordinary opportunity. It's so hard to meet our own expectations at any of these events, but I would encourage you to take a shot! Victory is not achieving the nth place, making an A-final or beating tiny Swedish girls in the finish chute; victory is chasing after a goal and throwing your best, diligent, intelligent effort at its pursuit. Whether you succeed isn't entirely under your control, but it is the quest that defines us.

Good luck, dude! Hope you feel better; I am also available to chat if you need a friendly ear. Will you be in Bostonland or New England any time in the near future?

I can't speak for stress, as I barely manage my own, but from a physiological standpoint, you've done some great training lately, and if you take a break/rest week, your body will actually have a chance to absorb it. And hopefully your stress will sort itself out. Training only works with appropriate amounts of rest (how much is appropriate is individual, of course...). I'm actually planning a rest week for next week. see, even I rest sometimes =)

walk for a week to make the WOC week better. How are the knees on an easy spin? how about a week or two of easy Yoga or stretching mixed with some map study? Water running is always a low impact way to maintain or enhance fitness. Sounds like where I was 6 years ago and I really looked forward to those water runs with you (and of course the water slide competitions afterwards). :-) If the stress in academia related then I've found that the orienteering is an essential way to reduce it.

Agree with all above - and would add - maybe you want to think about which races you want to specifically focus on (unless this is already determined), and then work out a plan for those in particular. Rest is important - and as Hammer says, there are ways to cross-train. Yoga can be really helpful, both for body alignment and stress reduction! Talk anytime if you want - my skype is karenwilliamsmiddleton!!!
And go listen to the winning Eurovision song contest - and the TOTALLY AWESOME Russian entry - for a little positive energy :-)

Seems like a good idea to ask for some feedback before making any decisions. Looks like a good variety of thoughts and ideas.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement, everyone. AP is wonderful for the inspiration it provides sometimes, and I am lucky to have friends like you all over the world to give me some great suggestions and look out for me.

I will try to ease back into training now after four days off, and will do some alternative training as Hammer suggests to see how my body responds. No big decisions yet.

You even have friends like me who know not to comment at times like this. :P

and ones like this who considered a sarcastic comment inappropriate and so are at a loss for words ;)

How many times are you going to train yourself into injured (tired, not motivated, and I can keep counting) state, before you learn to:
A: plan your personal training better, by incorporating rest as a important part of whole getting better process;
B: execute that plan, despite the desire to race as much as you can gobble-up.
C: listen to your body and make right decisions to adjust, based on that.
There is always some forest training, racing around Uppsala, I do not see all OK Linne elite attending that.
Running O in forest around Uppsala will not give you much more for Swiss WOC middle race or sprint, your nav. skills are solid, ones or twice a week in forest shell be plenty to keep it going. I would suggest one full rest day ones a week from now to WOC + one really easy day once a week, and make it a system: lets say rest every Monday no matter what, easy training each Thursday.
Focus on Jukola now, get yourself rested and ready, it is a tough race, I will see you soon!
Here is our order at this point: Speedy, Old Goat, Wyatt, J-man, Nate, Eddie, Z-man. Our average age is 37.1, what is CSU's team? I think, you can make your team stronger by getting AliC to run, she really kicked some ass on Sunday :)

Here is some more: your longest race at WOC will be ~ 30-35 min, at T level (40 min for final), and 12-16 min just above T level. Teaching your body and brain to tolerate discomfort of a race is important, and if you can have a map in your hand during those specific training sessions, that is beneficial, too, You do not need to navigate during training, it can be done on a track to preserve sore ankles, or on a familiar trail with decent footing. Warm-up, as you would before the specific race, than race effort, glancing at the map and making decisions, finish sprint 20-30 sec, and cool down.
That produces same training effect on brain, heart, and muscles, but much less abuse than forest does.
(Relays, if you are selected, are not much longer, it falls into T-pace, if you are ready for 35 min, you will be just fine for 45-50 min.)
I know, you are the slave of the amount of training hours, accumulated in your log,
get it out of your system, that is only important during base building season, and we are right in the middle of racing season, so be prepared that your total training hours will drop to 5-6-7 hours a week total.
And, hopefully :), last: stay happy, take any opportunity to enjoy your current live, no matter what!

The Old Goat has spoken. All hail!

Not sure what I can add to the above after my experiment last week. A period of long slow jogging has certainly reinvigorated me to some extent (it even seems to have cured a couple of niggles). And it has reminded me of why I enjoy running. But that is all I am aiming for at the moment - just to race a few long races for fun. I am not sure I would take the same approach if I was aiming for WOC. For orienteering to feel good you need to be fresh and dynamic - you have plenty of time to get into that state before WOC and you can achieve that through active recovery for a couple of weeks (short, easy runs with some 10sec strides if you are feeling like it) then some WOC specific stuff. You might find you come out of this in surprisingly good form - if the reason you are tired is that you have been pushing the limits, then you will still have all that in the bank to draw on when you need it. Good luck!

I guess I should be able to tell the gravity of my predicament by the amount of sarcasm in the comments on my log. There isn't any, so I must be in trouble.

OJ, thanks for the words of encouragement and support! You are right that my approach should be different if I am planning for WOC than if I were just trying to get back to enjoying training and being healthy. You make a good point about needing to be fresh and dynamic - that will be the plan if I manage to get out of this rut I am in.

Meanwhile, a bit of alternative training and strength workouts and some attempts at running to see how the body responds. Reducing the amount of stress in life simply won't happen over the next few months, so it's more a matter of managing it. If things don't feel any better in a week, I think I'll bail on WOC. WOC isn't a place to go and run if you can't be at your top level.

And OldGoat, CSU's current line-up (with reservations for possible changes) is feet, ken, BorisGr, Biggins, mindsweeper, Matthias, Rosstopher, average age 33.1. Bring it on!

Enjoy jukola. I regret not having run that yet. would gladly have run one less WOC than I did to have run jukola instead. I found I had my best results when I had the most fun. Enjoy the training. by the way I'll be poaching one of your OK Linne club members to do wildfire research in my lab group as a PDF for a few years.

Which member? We need time to teach them enough of the Canadian language, so as to be able to carry on normal conversations. Like "How many bags of milk would it take to put out this wildfire?"

Like

Gustaf Granath will start as a PDF in my lab in January. Will be great to have him back in town.

Very cool.