Training Log Archive: BorisGr

I was seriously considering not training for a week or so to get my thoughts sorted out, but Anders Eriksson put up a very tempting long run invitation on the training bank, and here i was, with my Camelback and all, about an hour north of Uppsala, ready for a long run around the Florarna nature reserve. We ran with a 1:50000 map, so navigation was pretty rough, but the reserve itself was beautiful, with huge open marshes and birch groves scattered here and there. The first 75 minutes or so were in the woods, the rest on trails. A great run that makes me want to get back to training hard immediately. My foot did hurt on the rocky bits in the woods, though.

I guess I'm going back to logging training again after being away for a few days and then not feeling motivated to log afterwards. Coming back from France, I felt pretty discouraged by a combination of my own awful sprint race and some people's (possibly justified) comments about my poor overall results. Luckily, yesterday's 25-manna relay and today's run are making me feel excited about training and racing again - i guess it doesn't take much!

C • Talking Crap? 2

Immediately after coming back from the long run, I went to the Uppsala castle to meet up with Mats, Micke, Lina, and Sofie. We took a walk around the castle and its surroundings and discussed how some of this stuff is going to look on an ISSOM map. I've never made a map from scratch before (only made corrections to existing maps), so there is a lot of learning ahead, but i am looking forward to it. All advice is appreciated!

C • Castle Sprint 1

Warm-up and a bit of a cool-down in the rain at the 25-manna. The warm-up did little good, as i had to wait for the 6d leg runner to come in for at least 10 minutes more than i expected to.

25-manna - the 25-person relay just outside of Stockholm. The relay works like this:
leg 1 is normal and can be run by anyone;
leg 2 is normal and can be run by anyone;
leg 3 is run in parallel and has to be run by women: the leg 2 runner hands off 4 maps at the same time, and the 4 women are sent out;
legs 4-7 are also run in parallel, 4 people for each, with various age and/or gender requirements (legs 5 and 7 can be run by anyone). The first runner back from leg 3 hands off to the runner designated as 4a, the second to 4b, and so on. This continues up through leg 7. Then, as the leg 7 runners come in, they hand off to the leg 23 runner. The first three leg 7 runners hand off blank maps, and the leg 23 runner has to wait until the 4th leg 7 runner has come in to get an actual map and run off. Then, leg 24 is individual and has to be run by a woman, and leg 25 is a normal anchor leg and can be run by anyone. Confusing!!!
Anyway, i ran leg 7d for Linne's 2nd team, meaning i was the last leg 7 runner to go out. The first three guys went out pretty close together, but i kept waiting for 12 minutes for the last leg 6 guy to come in, so i knew it would almost certainly be me handing off the actual map to the leg 23 runner, so i had to run hard. Traditionally, the courses at 25-manna aren't extremely technical, and this was no exception. I had a pretty clean race, with maybe one 40-second mistake, and came in having helped bring us up from 68th to 60th place. My time was 39th of the 347 with my course, 4 minutes off the best time, so i was pretty happy. Plus, splashing through the mud and running with tons of people out there was so much fun!! In the end, we came in 66th (4th among second teams), and our first team came in 4th!!!! A pizza party and general celebration ensued.
Splits at http://www.obasen.nu/winsplits/online/sv/default.a...

C • Sjutton också 10

Event: 2006 North American Championships (Golden Leaf Orienteering Fest)
 

Warm-up for the long distance on the warm-up map.

The long. If you haven't seen the map yet, you should:
http://www.worldcup2006.fr/cartes_courses/longue/t...
and
http://www.worldcup2006.fr/cartes_courses/longue/t...
Pretty much the toughest race I've ever run, perhaps besides the Hudson Highlander in 2003. I made 17 minutes of errors and was reasonably satisfied with that (people such as Emil Wingstedt made about a half-hour's wort). Ended up 61st overall, but a whopping 52 minutes behind amazing Thierry (although he did have a little help from his friends Valentin and Jani along the way - http://news.worldofo.com/2006/10/06/wc-one-two-thr... ) !

Warm-up for the World Cup sprint. Legs felt sluggish, despite a day off the day before: the middle distance final got moved to Friday due to severe windstorms that knocked down tons of trees and sent the local sheep running for cover anyplace they could find, including huddling in a pile behind two donkeys who were breaking the wind for them!

World Cup Sprint race. Absolutely dreadful! My worst sprint in ages. I got to the first control, which was maybe 100 meters from the start, but read the code wrong (the numbers were sort of cursive, and the 31 looked like 54 to me). I ran around, relocated twice, and kept attacking, coming back to the same control each time. Eventually i decided to come up to it and finally saw the 31 written on the SI unit! Fine, a minute lost is bad, but not completely disastrous. However, the way i reacted to this was not by regaining control of my senses and continuing the race as usual, but with frantic, panicky orienteering, running too fast, not spending enough time to look at route choices, and making beginner mistakes. The worst was that i knew that i was doing this, but also could not stop and make myself slow down. Basically, this was my worst orienteering nightmare come true (well, in the worst nightmare, my pants would fall down as i searched for the spectator control, but luckily that didn't happen, and there were no spectators anyway.) Towards the end of the race i made another giant mistake, but i'll blame that on the map - the control was on the end of a stone wall that definitely did not end there. Oh well...
The end result was a miserable 4th place from the end, almost 50% behind the winner - in a sprint!!!

After we got back to our cabins, Neil dragged me out for a run around the lake, which turned out to be quite nice and cheered me up a bit. Thanks, Neil!

Event: World Cup Final Round- France
 

Warm-up and a short, nervous cool-down after the middle qualifier.

World Cup Middle Qualifier. The course is at http://www.worldcup2006.fr/cartes_courses/mdqualif...
I had a solid run, maybe too cautious, but certainly avoided disaster. While the navigation was tough and the terrain very technical, it wasn't as intense as what we saw at the model event, especially because you could use a number of trails. I probably should have seen that and changed my approach to be more aggressive, but i didn't and perhaps ended up running slower than i could have. Still, when i finished, i was ahead of Mats Haldin, plus the Norwegian and Brit in my heat, as well as a few others, so i was hopeful. But as the likes of Holger, Novikov, and Hubmann came in, it became clear that i would miss out. Regardless, i was reasonably satisfied with my run - avoiding disastrous mistakes in this terrain was an accomplishment in itself.

Map hike on the sprint model event at Plateau de Gergovie with Viktoria and Sandra and lots of sheep.