Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Not sure how climb is calculated in Portugal, but I got my climb at roughly double the advertised on both days. That involved plenty of one and two-contour up and downs (and it didn't really feel like a 6-6.5% course), but I had a go at producing a climb-minimising route on Sunday, including some wildly outlandish deviations, some crashing of dark green and contouring along the side of a gorge which I suspect would have been impassable in practice, and could still only get down to 330 - 270 was advertised.

POM long distance. A significantly better run today - still couldn't run up the big hills, but otherwise felt fairly reasonable - certainly a major step up from today. Not as much dark green or as many difficult walls as yesterday, either, and a pretty smooth run technically. Most significant time loss was at 5, once again a route one rather than a navigation one - this was one of the ones in "tiger country" and I planned a route which contoured into the control, but the slope was impassable (not sure how much help the map was with that) and I had to do a bit of rockclimbing to get up to somewhere I could get across. Maybe lost a minute there. Still got blown away on the run-in but various young kids but I'm used to that. This will give me a bit more confidence - it's actually the longest course I've done for a while (since the middle of last year, I think).

This felt like a run several minutes better than yesterday, and the results bore that out - about a third of the way down this time, and about 10 percentage points closer to the winner (Eric Perrin again, in 55).

Headed off straight after the event, wanting to leave enough time for contingencies on the way back to Porto, and got some. First I found myself on Coimbra's bridge to nowhere - a very impressive structure, but the motorway then abruptly ends at the base of a cliff a few hundred metres later (probably to be a tunnel entrance eventually) with a small road off to the side continuing on. Then had a half-hour traffic jam at roadworks going into Porto - trying to squeeze four lanes into one on a major motorway was always going to be challenging. Still made the flight back to Geneva comfortably.