Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Taking to the Hungarian forests. This was the first time for many years that I've run in a European forest in the colder months, so I was expecting (correctly - most of the map's green barely existed) that it would be a good deal more open than in the summer. However, the contours (of which there were more than advertised) have no seasonal variation. I can cope (more or less) with lots of climbing - but struggled badly with running on extremely steep slopes, especially as they were quite slippery (probably would have been regardless but light overnight and morning rain made sure of it). 14, 15 and 16 were on an escarpment which drops 90 metres in about 150 metres horizontal, and it took me about 11 minutes to cover 600 metres in that section, despite totally open forest. We don't get any experience of that type of very steep, slippery ground in Australia; I'd have been interested to see how the good locals (or Matthias Merz, who was at the meeting in his capacity as chair of the Athletes Commission and ran M21 today) did it.

Lost about 5 minutes across three controls: 5 and 16 were both small errors in distance but in such steep country that it took me a while to get back to where I should have been, 18 was just silly. The climb through 20 was cruel and unusual punishment (and my back locked up a bit coming out of there, too). Foot OK throughout. Probably would have struggled to get much under 80 with a good run; Mikko won with 66 with the best local at 73.

There's a lot to be said for a sport which is sufficiently consistent worldwide that you can just turn up to a Hungarian weekend event and immediately have a pretty good grip of what is going on.

Now at Budapest airport on the way back to Amsterdam, after the drive back from the event (about 70km out of Budapest), passing a lot of posters with smiling faces, slogans I don't understand and party initials I partly understand - Hungary's off to the polls in three weeks' time. (So's Holland, for local council elections next week). It's not the most appealing of choices; the incumbents are a strongly conservative party with some parallels with the Abbott Liberals (and an intolerance for institutions which get in their way), very visible in the poster department - perhaps less so in likely votes - are Jobbik, a seriously nasty group who, along with Golden Dawn in Greece, are the closest modern Europe gets to a Nazi party, while the socialists are still struggling to recover from the economic issues (with some assistance from the GFC) of their last term. It probably didn't help that their leader (who's having another go this time) was taped saying to a party conference shortly after their last re-election that they'd "lied in the morning, noon and night" about the state of the budget.

A slight annoyance on the trip is that for unknown reasons, the car made a sound whenever it reached 79 km/h. I'm assuming my habit, circa 1977, of making a police siren noise from the back seat whenever the car appeared to exceed the speed limit would have been somewhat more annoying.