Training Log Archive: BorisGr

From home to the start and back home from the finish.

Orienteering training on Nåsten with Ross and Patrick (!!!), who was in town for Jan and Linnea's beautiful wedding. I drew a course using Naturpasset controls, and we took turns leading. Orienteering felt very natural today, and it felt easy to pick out good lines in the terrain. My legs came alive after a while too, and the company was great. Just a really nice session. Too bad Patrick isn't around for longer.

Intervals in Stadsskogen with a really nice group of Alli, Ross, Patrick, Elisa, Henrik B, and Jacob.

Warm-up plus running drills.

Another run in Paris, this time with Alli. Past the Louvre and through the Tuileries Gardens, then towards Les Invalides and back through the streets and past St.Sulpice.

By myself along the Seine, down into some sketchy neighborhood and back.

A sightseeing run with Alli in Paris, with a break in the middle to go see Napoleon's tomb.

In Bruges. Really fun run, following Olle Kärner's routes from this race: http://olle.server.ee/files/kaart000575.jpg

Around Stadsskogen with Alli

Warmup

Cooldown

Middle distance #1 at near race-pace effort.

Middle distance #2.

Warm-up

Attempted running long intervals, but failed. The plan was 2x12 minutes with a three-minute break. I did not feel good from the start, probably still recovering from my Jukola-induced cold. Struggled through the first interval and half the second and then stopped. Ugh.

Running from home to the start with Alli.

Contours-only course on Nåsten. Ran at a comfortable pace, and felt pretty confident most of the way. Definitely forced to slow down a bunch in greener or swampier areas. Need to work more on that.

QR: http://www.dxdeluxe.se/linnekartparmen/show_map.ph...

Compass training on Nåsten. Definitely something I need to keep working on. Had some very good legs here, but one really bad one too, which is frustrating. Tough to run straight through bumpy terrain, but I think this is really good training.

QR: http://www.dxdeluxe.se/linnekartparmen/show_map.ph...

Running back home. Really nice evening in Hågadalen.

Lunchtime run with Alli. We did Jan's hilly loops at Sten Sture. I felt pretty weak, but it was nice to be outside.

Woke up with a sore throat and a headache, which is not too surprising after Jukola weekend. So a forced rest day. The highlight was cheering for the Linné contingent at a 5km downtown. Albin and Henrik were 1-2, Ross was 4th, and Johan 6th. Lisa R, Lina, and Elin ran well for the girls, and Alli got another 5km PR!

I did a pretty long warm-up to get my body ready to go for a 4am race. A shorter cooldown, as I ran around the event center trying to figure out how team 1 was doing.

Jukola!

106 45 OK Linne 2 SWE 8:56:43
1 Johan Hamelius 1:20:24 139.
2 Mats Fröberg 1:32:46 291. 2:53:10 227.
3 Jörgen Ohlin 1:33:00 83. 4:26:11 138.
4 Ulrik Imberg 46:11 93. 5:12:22 132.
5 Boris Granovskiy 46:02 92. 5:58:25 116.
6 Smith Ross 1:17:47 121. 7:16:13 110.
7 Olof Eriksson 1:40:30 92. 8:56:43 106.

This was a weaker Linné 2 team, as the club was missing at least a full Jukola team's worth of top runners, so we did not have ambition to match last year's impressive 45th place. However, we figured that a top 100 should be doable with seven solid runs, and top 80 was not out of the question. However, we got a tough start as Johan made a mistake early and had to fight hard to gain back places for the rest of the leg. He did a great job fighting back to exchange in 139th place after dropping to about 300th early on. Mats Fröberg had a tough day physically and technically and was disappointed with his run. However, we got a boost on the long night leg, as Jörgen was a machine picking up nearly 100 places with a great run. Ulrik was solid on leg 4, and then it was my turn, going out in 132nd.

I didn't get any sleep this time, as the Linné 1 boys were providing far too much entertainment on TV to make sleep and appealing option, and so it took me a while to get the body in racing mode. However, when it needed to, the adrenaline rush came, and the usual excitement that I get before racing a Jukola or Tiomila leg was there. When Ulrik exchanged to me and I ran off towards the start triangle, my legs felt great and I was flying.

Jukola is a bit special in that massive elephant trails form to virtually every control as a result of 10000 people romping through the forest all day and night. This means that a lot of orienteering is reduced to following the right elephant path and not getting dragged off to the wrong control. This went really well for me in the beginning, and I was having a really good race through 7 controls.

On the way to number 8, however, I got too comfortable relying on elephant tracks and left #7 in the wrong direction. I adjusted as soon as I figured it out, but then had to attack a control on a boulder in the middle of a green bland hillside, and did not know exactly where I was attacking from. I missed with my first attack, relocated, and finally got the control on the second attempt, losing about 2 minutes in the process.

I made another mistake a couple of controls later, also in pretty bland terrain, where I was off on my bearing, and lost another minute. The rest of the course went well, and I felt like all the other controls were exactly where I expected them to be, so there are some positives to take away from this.

I exchanged to a smiling Ross in 116th place, having picked up 16 spots for us. It was an ok race, but could have been a very good race given the speed and focus I had for most of it. Still, encouraging with still some time left to improve shape before WOC.

Ross and Olle had solid runs on the final two legs, and brought us back to the brink of the top 100, finishing in 106th, the best Jukola placing ever for any team I have been on.

C • Yay Linné 1

Jukola model event. Got off the bus after the three hour ride from Turku to Jämsä, dropped off our stuff at the team tent, and went out on the model map adjacent to the event center. I was joined by Ross and Andrew, and we mostly stayed together the entire time, sometimes stopping to discuss routes. It was nice, and I enjoyed orienteering and chatting with the boys. We finished with some strides on the trail back to the event center.

This was followed by spectating Venla, where our girls did an amazing job. The first team got a great run by Cat leading off, followed by solid legs 2 and 3 from Inga and Lina to keep us in striking distance. Then Annika did the rest on the anchor leg. After a shaky start, she rocked the rest of the course and ran through a bunch of other top runners such as Helena Jansson, before out-orienteering Tove in the end to bring Linné to the finish in 3rd place, the club's best-ever performance in either of the big relays! It was an amazing feeling when Annika appeared at the last control alone in third place, and our mob of adoring fans could not stop jumping and shouting as the team ran up the finish chute.

The other Linné teams did not disappoint either. Teams 2,3,4,5 were really even the whole way and finished in places 29, 34, 49, and 39 (out of about 1150) to show the amazing depth we have in the club. Team 6 finished 132nd to round off a great day for Linné ladies.

Traveling to Finland with the club in the evening

Wanted a slower map-reading session today, as i was not super-happy with my orienteering yesterday. So I joined Sam and Hanna for control site tagging at Östfora for their DM-middle courses this fall. There was some great terrain there - it will be a really good event. Got what I wanted out of this session, with a lot of detailed map reading, focusing on looking up to see things ahead of me and being careful with direction out of the control. I rolled my ankle near the end, so decided to skip the running session I had hoped to do later in the evening.

Lunchtime hill intervals on the gravel road that goes up the hill just before the start of backbana. I did six intervals, all between 1:26-1:29, with 2:30 jogging rest to get back to the start. Felt tired.

Orienteering training at Fiby with relay start. Three loops, coming back to the start each time. I had an uneven performance, with some stretches of really good orienteering and some stretches of panicked, unfocused running. Need to get my head back into training.

Also, after enough injuries on Linné's second Jukola team I have been called in to run leg 5, so I will travel to Finland with the club tomorrow.

C • cool! 6

Lunchtime run on Jan's hilly loop on Sten Sture.

Back from St.Petersburg. Went for a morning run on Nåsten and got caught in a downpour - kind of nice, actually. Then went to MP for a needle treatment on my back, which has been giving me weird twinges after training the last couple of weeks.

The evening, much like the one before, was spent with Ulrik poring over winsplits, eventor, world of o, and all other resources of orienteering trivia as we tried to place 28 Linné girls into 6 Venla teams plus reserves in the best way we could. It proved to be a very difficult task, as the results are very close, and in many cases one just has to go with a gut feeling when all else is equal. Part of the job also involves delivering difficult and disappointing news to people, and that is the part I hate most, especially when those people are your friends and clubmates, people whom you see training hard alongside you all winter and spring. I don't know if this experience is teaching me to better handle having to disappoint people or will scare me away from any position like this in the future, but I am learning to empathize with selectors: someone will always be disappointed and upset at you, and someone will always think you made a bad decision or made a decision for the wrong reasons. Regardless, Ulrik tells me that when the teams do well, it is a fantastic and thrilling feeling for the UK, and I am looking forward to experiencing that this weekend.

A night run in St.Petersburg with Alli to see some of the bridges over the Neva open to let in shipping traffic. Really fun run. This city is beautiful at night!

To the start

Venla test race, for which I designed the course. I took this at a steady pace - well below racing, but such that I could orienteer smoothly and in control. This was hard to do as the terrain was fairly rough with lots of stuff on the ground, and my legs were tired from the 10km. I did a good job focusing on the orienteering and felt in control nearly the entire time without forcing myself to think about the orienteering - I was orienteering on auto-pilot, and that felt really good. This was the last session of a good block of training before a few days of rest in St.Petersburg. I will start up the next block when I am back in Uppsala on Monday.

I am running Stockholm's Blodomloppet 10km tonight. Not sure what to expect, but my 10km PR is 37:14 from 2007, when I was in better shape than now, but ran a very poorly paced race. I think anything under 38 will be good for my current shape.

C • Woo! 5

Warm-up and cool-down for Blodomloppet

Blodomloppet Stockholm 10km road/trail race on Djurgården and Gärdet.

My workplace was signing up a bunch of people to run, so I joined in, thinking that it is good to get in some sessions where I really push myself. Before the race, Ross and Sam gave a good tip to push to the front of the starting field so as to not get stuck behind slower people. I did just that, and am really glad that I did, as there were not very many people running significantly faster than me from the start, and being stuck would have been frustrating.

Despite my best efforts, I still failed at pacing the first kilometer and sailed through at 3:34, while aiming for 3:45. I settled down a bit after that and felt strong for the next few kilometers, gradually moving up in the field, especially on uphills and downhills. Around the 6km mark the course went into the woods, and we had a long stretch on a narrow, rocky trail. It was hard to pass people there, but I caught the group in front of me, and managed to get by a couple of guys on the rocky downhill.

Around 8km, the course went along a soft gravel riding path, with very soft, mushy footing. I had a hard time handling it and getting into any sort of rhythm, and I think I lost a lot of energy and momentum here, especially since I was not expecting it. The rest of the way to the finish was a struggle, and I just tried to hang on. Two more guys passed me on the uphill finish sprint, and I finished 16th, just around the time I expected for myself given my current shape.

Running over to backbana, and then doing some stretching, running drills, and strides while cheering Ross, Sam, and Kate on backbana.

A nice session on Lunsen with Ross. We biked down and then did a course on last year's Naturpasset controls, since we already had maps with that course drawn in. We took turns leading and got going pretty well after a couple of sizable mistakes in the beginning by each of us. A really fun session with good company.

Collecting some controls on Åland with Alli, while Ulrik collected the other loop. We were mostly walking, with Alli navigating. She did a really good job on the difficult course, picking out fairly subtle contour and rock details and seemingly improving as we went along. Everything was really fun about this outing, except for the extremely high, infinite really, mosquito-to-moose ratio.

C • You definitely need more moose. 1