Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

First long run since I got back, and the longest I've done anywhere for a couple of months (at least in distance) - a little longer than the 105-110 minutes I'd planned on but can live with that. Definitely noticed that it's the first time for a while that I've done anything long on hard ground; my lower legs were definitely on the sore side in the second half (and my calves were very tight, as revealed when I had the first session on them with the needles for a few weeks afterwards).

Started promisingly again, but had to work pretty hard through most of the second half before picking up again in the last 15 minutes. Blisters continuing to recover gradually, and not really interfering with my running now except that I have to be careful with the way I plant my foot on sharp right-hand turns. Hopefully the 48 hours of relative rest that they'll now get will fix them up properly (and I won't recreate them at Sunday's event).

Never really got properly going for this one, despite a promising start. Heels continuing to improve but only very slowly. Noticed that a building site has taken over one of my occasional exit routes from the city for work-based runs (I came in early this morning so I could drop by and pick up my pack, which has finally arrived, before the traffic got too bad), so will need to find other ways to get to the Port Melbourne foreshore.

Is being swooped by a magpie in July a sign of climate change? Discuss.

I knew I was back home on having my first encounter since arriving back with a four-wheel-driver, who I'd had the temerity to delay by a second or two, who blasted their horn and raised the finger. And here was I thinking yesterday that we'd taken another significant step towards becoming a civilised country again...

C • Magpies in July 3

Second session of the day, this time having my first look at the Tan for a couple of months. The building works on the lower part seem to have finished but builders elsewhere are still using it as a car park. Nice weather but again I struggled to really get going, as was the case this morning.

The council must have declared 30 July as Melbourne Be Nasty Day as I encountered another bit of unpleasantness on this run - in this case a woman who went ballistic when I bumped into her (and promptly apologised to) when she stepped sideways as I was about to pass her.

Another frosty morning (although it was drier than yesterday so there wasn't the amount of ice around that there was then) and another pleasant if unspectacular run. Again held up well for most of the way but heel starting to feel a bit sore again in the last 10 minutes.

It looks like I was in pretty good company in failing to last the four days last week because of blister trouble (http://www.oringen.se/1332.php). At least for Thierry it was a good deal less dramatic than his previous DNF.

Back in Melbourne last night, although my bag isn't - it unsurprisingly failed to make what became a 35-minute connection in Helsinki. (I did have my hopes up when we saw Bridget's bag come off the plane in Helsinki as we were waiting to get off it, but mine failed to follow it). Both of us, especially Bridget, also ended up having tight connections in Hong Kong but both of us made it. I guess with the number of trips I've done in the last eight months it was inevitable that my bags would go astray somewhere, and on the way home is the least worst place for it to happen - the biggest drawback is that the 'shoe inspection' queue at Quarantine is normally the quickest one so it took me 30 minutes longer to get out of the airport than it usually does.

The run itself was a reasonable one. The blisters (or to be more accurate the healing bits of raw flesh where the blisters were) were OK for most of the way, but one of them opened up a bit towards the end - will need watching. Slept OK if not brilliantly last night so should hopefully have most time-zone issues sorted out.

It was a lot colder than Sweden, to the point that there was quite a bit of ice around if you looked in the right places (the Yarra footbridges were particularly fine examples) - it rained a fair bit yesterday so there was plenty of moisture around. Those of us of Canberra origin always have a bit of fun in such situations watching Melburnians grapple with the problem of how to get ice off car windscreens.

Providing the blisters don't cause too many problems, the plan is to have a slightly-easier-than-normal week this week, then go into a fairly heavy cycle for 3-4 weeks ahead of the main local competition season.

C • Welcome back Blair. It's b... 1

In transit (currently at Hong Kong). Highlight so far has been the hapless ground staff for Sterling (a budget Danish airline) at Oslo airport, who in an unusual display of honesty announced to the assembled multitude that they apologised for the delay and had no more idea than the passengers did as to what was going on, and if people wanted to know more they should ring the Sterling office in Copenhagen. (Later they advised that due to staff shortages no bags could be loaded - glad I wasn't on that flight).

The blisters aren't a lot better and I felt stiff in a lot of places where I don't normally feel stiff, which may be an indicator that I was running yesterday with altered form (a good way to do yourself another injury). If today had been a World Cup I'd probably have at least started, but there isn't a lot to run for today at my end of the field (unless you think I could bridge a 62-minute gap to Baptiste Rollier and pick up a few thousand euros) and there didn't seem to be a lot of point slogging around for 90 minutes or so on a hot day. I therefore added my name to what appeared to be the rapidly-expanding 'Ej start' list.

With a bit of luck three days' rest - I'm on a plane from tomorrow lunchtime onwards - will do the trick and I'll be OK to start training again in Melbourne on Monday morning. Having seen the forecast for Melbourne Fitzroy Pool might be a bit too much of a seasonal shock first-up, though (as will the idea of it being dark at times other than between midnight and 3 a.m).

Celebrity-spotting time: last night Anne Margrethe Hausken, Minna Kauppi, Matthias Merz, Anders Nordberg and half the Swedish team were seen in the queue at the pizza place. This may be an indication that some of them are taking today less than seriously too (a few of them have already popped up as fellow members of the 'ej start' club).

This would have been a fabulously enjoyable orienteering experience for most of those involved - after taking a chairlift to the start, most courses spent most of the time running around the top of the mountain above the treeline before descending at the end (and the view from the top of the hordes running across the fells was quite something).

Unfortunately, I wasn't unable to enjoy it because my run was ruined by heel blisters from yesterday. I thought in the warm-up that it might not be too bad at running speed, but it was agony at the first bit of rough ground I hit and didn't get a lot better after that. It was all the more frustrating because of the knowledge of how much fun this would have been on a better day; it's definitely tempting to come back the next time I'm vaguely near the area and have another go. The chances are that this will be my last senior international appearance for Australia, and it's disappointing to go out on such a painful note.

I lost about a minute apiece at two controls. On 2 it was mostly route choice, going across a gully which I would have been better off going around. Csaba Gosswein, whose relay second leg for Hungary was arguably the 'unsung hero' performance of WOC, went through me there but there was no way I could even think about staying with him. (There was a punk band in my year of school called the Csabai Testicles - named after a brand of salami). I also went underneath 7 on a vague slope. Ended up beating more people (8) than I did on either of the other two days, despite this being my worst run - this may reflect the fact that people who have made big mistakes are more likely to pull the pin in a long distance than they are in a middle. (My junior apartment-mates seemed quite excited by the fact that I beat Johan Runesson, although it would be more accurate to say that Johan beat himself).

Unless my heels improve a lot overnight, I can't see myself going out tomorrow.

Someone's brought along a copy of a 'newspaper' from the Vuokatti region of Finland (bidding for WOC 2013), in which Hanny demonstrates a strong command of the fine art of telling journalists what they want to hear by saying how much she likes the idea of orienteering in northern Finland. Another piece in the same paper starts off:

"Scottish chefs and chef students accustomed to exotic food products do not share the views of the British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay concerning traditional Finnish cooking".

I'm not sure exactly what Gordon Ramsay had to say about Finnish cooking, but one can safely assume it wasn't very complimentary and probably had a lot of "fuck"s in it. Not sure if I'd pay too much attention to Scottish chefs in this regard when the country's best-known items of food are the haggis and the deep-fried Mars Bar.

C • well fark 1

If this had been a 12km course it would have been a very solid run, but in the end the distance defeated me. Even at my peak I haven't had a lot of chances to run a genuine long race against the best in the world, as I rarely survived qualifying. There's no qualifying this week so it was a good opportunity to challenge myself against the best, and I'm not regretting taking the World Cup on even though my result was poor (6 from the bottom in the end) and I'm pretty exhausted now.

The day had some minor misadventures early on. I got woken up by a spam SMS from Optus at 5 and couldn't get back to sleep, and then didn't realise the bus stop for today was different to yesterday's and there was a 20-minute walk I hadn't counted on. This meant a bit less preparation time at the event site than I would have liked but it was fine by the end of the warm-up.

After the long first leg, the first half of the course was largely above the treeline, although with a couple of tricky butterfly loops in a semi-forested complex set of gullies. I missed 1 very slightly but then got going nicely. By the start of the butterfly, about 40 minutes in, I'd been caught 8 minutes by a Norwegian and 2 by Mike Smith, and had caught 4 on an Estonian. Mike showed me into 6 where I was lacking confidence before easing away. I got through the long legs off the mountain, potentially perilous, without any time loss, and was still travelling well at the start of the second butterfly, in a bunch 6 minutes up on a Spaniard and 4 down on a Latvian.

I started to cramp a bit at this stage - and had been annoyed by heel blisters most of the way. I then missed two in a row on a short butterfly loop, 16 slightly and 17 badly (3 minutes), and started to cramp seriously on the climb into 18. That eased for the second butterfly loop, but I made an annoying miss 100m wide of the road crossing, and then hit the wall in a big way. From there it was a survival battle for the last 3k, walking on anything that remotely resembled a hill and jogging (most of) the rest - at least I didn't lose any more time to errors.

Not surprisingly I've been pretty exhausted for the rest of the day, although with none of the muscle soreness that followed the marathon - which is just as well as we race again tomorrow (However, for the first couple of hours I couldn't so much as yawn without setting off a cramp somewhere). I would have hoped to last the distance better than this - at two-thirds distance I was on track for something close to 2.00 which I would have been reasonably satisfied with. Obviously going for 2 or 2 1/2 hours on hard ground doesn't prepare you for a 2-hour race in this; it may also count for something that I haven't done anything over 100 minutes since Jukola.

One hoodoo which has been broken is that of O-Ringen Tuesdays. I have run four previous O-Ringen events and on all of them my Tuesday performance has been catastrophic. (Even if it was converted to a second-day hoodoo, today was disappointing but not disastrous).

Not sure if he's logging at the moment or not, but you can substitute Julian's name for mine in several of the preceding paragraphs and you'd have a pretty good description of his run too (but he was faster in the first two-thirds than I was).

C • Good survival strength 1

Wouldn't normally bother to log this but thought it might be of interest. The notes on mountain orienteering for O-ringen included something to the effect of 'ask your club's M/W60s how to pace-count' (there are a lot of straight slopes with very few features). After reading that I thought I'd better go out on the model map and check what mine was (answer - 50-55/100 metres).

It seems a bit strange to be feeling good about coming 79th in a field of 82 (especially when I was sitting in the bus back next to Daniel Hubmann, who finished about 40 places higher and was utterly disgusted - he almost missed 7 and only turned back when he heard the commentary), but I really enjoyed this race, both the experience and the result. I know I'm going to be close to the bottom this week (although I would have liked to have picked off a few of the North Americans, Japanese and Kiwis who were in the minute or so ahead of me), but the main goal is not to be hopelessly uncompetitive as I was in Norway, and I think I more or less achieved this.

We started high on a ski slope (large parts of the race were visible from the arena). I didn't take a great route to 1 and was a bit tentative on the steep descent into the control - something which might bite me a bit more on the next two days. I then felt like I was running fairly well but was a little disconcerted when the Japanese runner (quick but erratic) caught me a minute between 4 and 5. I then settled quite nicely, doing the forest stretch well; took an unnecessarily difficult line across the half-pipe into 7, then stretched out on the second half through the scattered ski cabins. Missed 11 by a few seconds. In the last few controls it was apparent that Mattias Karlsson, who started 4 minutes behind me, was on a very good time because the commentators kept talking about how good a time he was on. My goal then became to hold him off, which I did - just. (They then kept talking about his strong finish - must have been because he had something to chase :-)

This was a really enjoyable experience, a return to the big time in a way that Norway wasn't. There were several thousand people watching (and I got the full wall of sound in the finish because Mattias was coming in just behind), and plenty of support from the people in and around the ski cabins too - to say nothing of the autograph-hunters at the exit from the finish. I was on a high for a while after this and felt terrific on the warm-down; hopefully I can take this into tomorrow.

Event: Oringen 2008
 

A lot of travelling today which made it a good day to schedule a rest day, although I woke up early enough that I would have had time to squeeze something in had I still been looking to maintain a multi-year streak. The sequence was Olomouc to Prague by train (very nice, although that was partly because I'd booked a first-class ticket by mistake when I thought the ticket clerk was asking me whether I wanted a one-way or return), Prague to Oslo by plane (fairly painless, although the luggage took forever to arrive, and my quest for a watch continues because of the 82 shops that Prague airport boasts about, 80 of them appear to sell exactly the same items - grog, cigarettes, perfume and sometimes chocolate), and Oslo to Salen by bus (also fairly painless, except for the reminder at the food stop as to how expensive Norway is).

The WOC results were probably at or slightly above expectations - the relays were around where I thought we'd be but I didn't think we'd get any individual results quite as good as 14th. (Kathryn probably got some help from running with Liisa Anttila, but as someone has done an analysis which has found that 60% of the women's field spent significant time in packs she was hardly alone in that). The women will be even more formidable next year if we get Hanny back, but the same can't be said for the men - there is a steep drop from the top three to the rest and the word is that some, perhaps even all, of those three won't be fronting next year. (Take out the top three from this year and you'd be left with a team which looked something like Kerrin, William, Matt and Reuben - probably capable of getting in or close to the top 20 in the relay, but any individual final appearance would be a bonus).

One of the more dramatic days that I can recall in orienteering - it's definitely not every relay which has three lead changes in the last five controls, and the leader at the start of that section departing the vicinity of the last control, not in the company of triumphant flag-waving teammates, but in the back of a helicopter. (As I've noted on the WOC thread, Thierry appears to have recovered very quickly indeed and I think he's probably still going to race this week).

As often on such days my own run was a relatively minor consideration after this - just a quick session around the streets of Olomouc sandwiched between return and WOC banquet. It ended up being my best run of the week - the first time since Monday when running hasn't seemed like a chore, especially in the second half, much of which was spent on a dirt path along one of the rivers. Of the occasional local hazards of dogs and drunks, I saw one of each but both were harmless.

Once again ran poorly after a day when my mind had been on other people's races most of the time. Lost time at 1, a dodgy ditch end in the green, then settled down a bit, but further mistakes, none of them huge, at 7, 12 and 17. 12 was particularly annoying because I'd seen people running the leg about 60 times during the day (it was one of the TV controls) and still stuffed it up. Didn't have a huge amount of energy for the bigger climbs either, especially at 9 where I took the low route and had a steep 11-contour climb at the end, a lot of it through felled stuff, with the flag visible all of the way.

I'm still not at all confident running on loose wet rock, and took a fall coming out of 12 which would have been spectacular for the cameras had they still been there. I ended up with a bruised hand from this and a bruised ego from being comprehensively outsprinted by one of the local W14s (although the latter event is not unheard of - Amber Morrison did it to me when she was 10).

My focus this week has been on things other than my own performances - it's probably no coincidence that my best run by far of the week was the day with no WOC race - but I'm still a bit concerned that I haven't had a really good run physically since Bordeaux. Hopefully I'll be able to focus well next week and come through more strongly then.

Didn't stay around for the public race presentations, so I can't report on whether the Czech clubs still do some of the more extravagant celebrations that I remember from the 1996 5-Days (the club 'train dance' whenever someone from the Lokomotiva Pardubice club went up on stage being the most memorable).

In the name of using this run for suburban exploration, I spent it in search of Stalinist architectural atrocities in the suburbs of Olomouc. You have to look pretty hard these days to find monoliths of decaying grey concrete - a lot of them have had some serious paintwork (one set of apartment blocks had the greatest range of colours I've seen this side of the old Benjamin Way offices, now demolished), and in the spirit of capitalism some have ads on their sides. I did find a few examples but suspect for real highlights of the genre you need to go to the Ukraine or Belarus (or the Housing Commission towers in Collingwood).

As for the run: about as good as I expected after a day of IOF meetings and eating too much at the supporters' afternoon tea before going for a run at about 6.45 (i.e. not very).

I've discovered that Connex run buses here too. This would mean that, had I been paying attention, I would now know how to say "Connex apologises for any inconvenience caused" in English, French, Dutch, Czech and Portuguese. (Most of the time here we've been using the excellent trams).

The longest day in orienteering is a two-race middle distance day. It is even longer when there is a long journey to the event area (and a 1600 metre walk from parking to arena, a walk we did four times during the day), and when it was raining, as it was for most of the morning. It certainly wasn't as hard spectating at WOC as it was actually running it, but it was still a very long day. After filing a report for the OA website and getting something to eat, I finally got back to my room at 10.30 p.m. (Normally I'd regard going to McDonalds in a foreign country as showing a severe lack of imagination, but there wasn't a lot else open at 10.15 in Olomouc).

In between the two WOC races we had a race of our own - just to add to the logistical challenge this was a few kilometres away with a shuttle bus (which worked as well as could be expected). It was reputed to be a tough area from reports we've heard of WOC training there. It was certainly slow, with more rock than we've had on other days, but I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to on a day when competing could be a slightly unwelcome distraction from other matters.

For most of the run my own race was slow and cautious, especially in the green, but reasonably clean. Annoyingly, I then lost time at a late control in low visibility as I did on Monday - about 2 minutes on 18 this time. Lacked confidence, though, running on the wet small rocks in the early part of the course.

Scarily, someone who is presumably not good enough to make the Czech team did 6.5 min/km on this.

The IOF and media race, at an area that was partly fairly easy forest and partly golf course (the first time I've seen a golf course mapped at the level of detail that a 1:5000 map allows, with bunkers and so on). Didn't feel hugely motivated for a fast run but got going once I was into the map, as sometimes happens on these occasions. Running quite fast - at least for me - by the end., and didn't miss anything.

(It looked like a pretty good golf course and I'm surprised they let us run on it, although it had mainly been used for the Trail-O event. The bunker near the start was fearsome and Tiger Woods would struggle to get up and down in two from it).

I found out last time that some of the opposition at this race can be pretty formidable, so it was no surprise to be well behind the likes of Bjornar Valstad, Tore Sagvolden and Sixten Sild. I was less pleased to be 7 seconds down on Tom Karlsen (a regular M55 WMOC medallist). Our splits were virtually identical so we clearly run at the same speed.

Today's event followed the WOC long qualification, and I set about demonstrating what the selectors had missed out on by failing to select me for the long distance. The answer - absolutely nothing.

I didn't feel that sharp in the warm-up and then started very poorly both physcially and technically, missing each of the first 3, 3 quite badly (2.5 mins), although I'm not 100% convinced of the control placement/mapping there. Settled a bit after that but never as strong as I was yesterday. Not really in control through the final control-picking stage in flat, marshy low visibility terrain, but managed to get through without a huge time loss.

This was a poor run, but I was still surprised just how far back I was - 22 minutes compared with 10 yesterday when I felt it was perhaps 5-7 minutes worse than yesterday. On km rates I would have been about 3 minutes behind Kerrin, and couldn't see myself breaking 75 for the WOC qualifier under even ideal circumstances, which would still be a long way from qualifying (albeit perhaps a bit closer than I was 2 years ago in Denmark).

The route to the event took us past a facility which now proudly proclaims itself to be a tank factory. According to Zsuzsa Fey (who has a certain amount of experience of life under communism) such facilities were quite often officially "bicycle factories" in a past life. Probably a fair number were tractor factories too.

One aspect of Australian elite orienteering where my speed has long been noted (more so than on the course) is at the dining table. It now appears that I have a rival, in the perhaps slightly unexpected form of Bridget Anderson.

C • Terrain 5

First day of the public races. For those who are doing them it is six days in a row, two longs then four middles. I´ll miss two days through IOF meetings (it´s four days out of six so I will still get an overall result) and in any case this is not a high priority compared with next week.

This was expected to be the most physical day of the week, and was fairly solid going with several trips up and down an escarpment early on. It was classic central European terrain - lots of tracks and vegetation changes, and point features on slopes with very little definition in the contours.

For the most part I was happy with this run but it was a disappointment to lose a bit of time at the very end - 20 seconds on 18 and 40 on 19. Apart them that I was spiking controls pretty well which isn´t always easy in this terrain, and was also happy with my strength on the hills - even won a split on a steep uphill leg. A pleasantly cool day. 18th out of 50 in 21E when I left.

Previously at a Czech 5-day I´ve seen someone have a smoke in the start box. No-one was smoking in the start box this year but someone was doing it on the way to the start. Also saw a very old Skoda parked at the drink station in the forest, with a number plate starting PVC, possibly a reference to what the car was made out of.

Today was also the first day of the World Trail-O Championships (a form of the sport for the disabled). The Stating the Bleeding Obvious Award goes to whoever put a ´Forbidden Area For Trail-O´ sign at the foot of a steep staircase that was hard enough for the able-bodied to negotiate.

A fairly casual circuit of central Olomouc with Liggo in the time window in between the WOC sprint qualifying and final. Rather warm and humid, felt reasonable while running but not spectacular. Most memorable moment was seeing two people fishing a third person (presumably drunk, but conscious) out of the river.

I thought this would be a long but fairly straightforward trip from Paris to Olomouc, but it turned out to be anything but. The legs were supposed to be Paris-Mannheim, then an overnight train to Dresden, then a connection to Prague, then another one to Olomouc (hopefully linking up with a few of the other Australians in Prague).

First hint of trouble was when the train (one of the fast ICE ones) was stopped at the first station in Germany and we had to change to another one. Remarkably, we only ended up 20 minutes late in Mannheim after this (although it´s fortunate I speak some German as the announcements telling us what platform to go to, which contradicted the multilingual ones we got on the first train, were only in German), and the overnight train was on time. Early the next morning, though, I woke up to an announcement that I thought said we were 140 minutes late. That can´t be right - this is Germany. I ask someone else in the compartment. It is right. We also got free coffee and 25% off the train ticket (but I suspect the process of claiming it will be more hassle than it´s worth). With this I missed the connection in Dresden, and everyone else moved on from Prague without me (my texting finger got a fair workout).

Piecing together what happened, an ICE train derailed in Cologne on Friday (spectacular but apparently no serious injuries). I think what´s then happened was that all other ICE trains were pulled off service at the first chance for checks, and with lots of trains being pressed into service as replacements, there was no locomotive to pull our half of the train when it split into Berlin and Dresden halves in the middle of the night. I woke a few times during the night and thought the ride was so smooth that it hardly seemed like we were moving - turned out we weren´t. In the circumstances I think we did well to be only two hours late - if it was V-line we´d still be standing by the side of the road waiting for them to beg, borrow or steal some buses.

The eventfulness wasn´t over. I arrived at Prague to see the station hall filled by about 400 teenagers (floorball players, as it happens) and hoped they were on a different train. They weren´t. This meant a very crowded trip indeed for the last leg, although others who came on different trains said those were just as bad. Finally stepped onto the platform at Olomouc 24 hours (minus 30 seconds) after leaving Paris.

A longer session in Paris.

David (the friend I'm staying with) is a pretty reasonable runner in his own right - some of you will have come across him in the Sydney Corporate Cup in the 1990s and early 2000s (and in my first foray into competitive running, under-10s at Little Athletics, my first objective was to finish on the same lap as him in the 1500). He's not doing much at the moment, being in recovery mode from doing a 250km race in the Gobi Desert (as you do), so hasn't been coming out with me, but did provide some excellent pointers to reasonably traffic-free routes. Today's route first went close to the Bastille, before picking up a path along what I'd guess was a former elevated railway to a loop through the Bois de Vincennes, a forest on the east edge of town. (Trivia question - how many prisoners were freed when the Bastille was stormed in 1789?).

Even in the urban areas I've been lucky with the traffic the last couple of days; even had a couple of friendly gendarmes stop the traffic for me this morning (OK, so they were really interested in the jam that was building on the other side of the intersection).

Despite all these advantages (and a cooler morning), though, it was a pretty ordinary run. Although there's been nothing intense this week, it is the first time for a very long time (maybe even the first ever) that I've gone over an hour on five days in a row and maybe that makes a difference. If it does then it should be sorted out quickly as I'll be spending most of the next 24 hours travelling.

Paris in early July is, not surprisingly, tourist central (and spending an hour waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower is a bit annoying), but there's an awful lot to see here and I've only scratched the surface in two days (and the food's good too). On the way to Olomouc tonight.

Did make a sighting of a genuine Australian-style boganmobile parked outside Notre Dame, complete with spoilers, oversized exhaust and fluffy dice. I guess it's progress that suburban Parisians are hotting up cars instead of setting them on fire (although the locals insist that the troubles of a couple of years back were blown out of proportion by the media, - something which of course has never happened in the history of the world).

C • Trivia answer: 2

Event: WOC 2008
 

Last time I was in Paris I spent precisely 22 minutes in the city. It was one of my epic European overland trips back in 1994 (Fiesch, Switzerland to Winchester, England in a day, involving six mainline trains, four underground/emtro ones, a bus and a ferry), and I had that long to get from Gare de Lyon to Gare de Nord. After a sprint up the stairs of the latter (almost flattening an old lady in the process) I made it with 15 seconds to spare.

This time I've got two days here, staying with a friend of very long standing (like since pre-school), and long-time partner in backyard cricket (and once a rogaine). Couldn't ask for a much better location - within 200 metres of Notre Dame. It must be very expensive real estate but when your job over the last three years has been running a commodities fund I guess you can afford very expensive real estate. (It also gives him licence to travel on company money pretty much anywhere in the world where there's a mine, so we were comparing notes last night on the highlights of Almaty, Kazakhstan).

In a big city one's choice of running routes is constrained a bit by finding options that are reasonably traffic-free. Rivers are often good for this and the Seine was the centrepiece of this run, going down as far as a park about 20 minutes away, then coming back up as far as the Louvre and finishing up with a circuit of Notre Dame. Felt reasonable without being spectacular. This week is really a week of maintenance training.

C • are you heading straight to... 3

In France for the first time since the 1996 World Cup events (and that was so close to the Swiss border it hardly counts). Yesterday turned out to be one of those days with lots of petty irritations (think walk a couple of km with your gear from the bus station to the train station, go through one slow queue and then another because all the ticket machines are broken, then discover that you're at the wrong station anyway and have another couple of km to walk), but all was happy again after a nice dinner on a nice square in Bordeaux.

This morning was a longer one, taking advantage of the fact that my train didn't leave until 10.47. I plotted a course on a map at the hotel which seemed reasonably promising, along the river and then across to a lake. It was a reasonably good route on the whole, although I hadn't noticed that my route took me past the Place de Reception des Dechets Urbains and the Unite de Traitement des Eaux Usees, which sound a lot better in French than they do in English (the tip and sewage treatment works respectively - at least they didn't smell too much). Spotted a few other groups of runners near the lake, including one group carrying a ladder - presumably firemen in training. Came back inland from the river; as sometimes happens in unknown cities I spent some of this on a more major road than I would have liked because I didn't trust my map memory enough to be more adventurous, until reaching the stadium at which point I knew it was 4km due east (this time I remembered to take my compass).

I feared the worst for this run when my Achilles was sore when I woke up but it settled quickly, and after a mundane first half the second half was very smooth, especially the last 30 minutes.

The next mission of the day was to get to Chateauroux for the end of today's stage of the Tour. I hadn't planned this trip around the Tour, but when I saw that my planned route could intercept it with some minor modifications I thought 'why not'? For a while I thought I wasn't going to make it because we had a 44-minute connection in Limoges and left Bordeaux 43 minutes late, but made up enough time en route to have a little to spare. As might be expected the Tour (and its build-up) is quite a spectacle, although it's all over in 10 seconds once the riders arrive - I was on a corner about 1.5km from the finish. Didn't find out who actually won the stage until I got to Paris.

C • Good finish to watch 3

As my birthday usually falls during the peak of the European orienteering season (in most years, although not this one, it's during JWOC), I've spent it in a lot of different places over the years. Spain and, later today, France are this year's additions to a list which includes the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, Romania, Finland, Lithuania, Canada and Japan (and, within Australia, in addition to the obvious Canberra and Melbourne, Jindabyne, Newcastle, Bendigo, Warwick, Darwin and Dubbo).

This morning's run involved exploring the nice bits of Santander, especially the beach district about 4km east of the city centre. I wish I'd known about this (and the fact that it contains all the good places to stay and eat) 12 hours ago because I ended up in one of the worst dives I've stayed in in my 37 years - this sometimes happens when you enter a place without plans or information and take pot luck. I then decided I'd at least put the money I'd saved into eating somewhere decent but struck out there too. Hanging around the bus interchange was a more appealing prospect - albeit a decision assisted by the fact that it's a wireless hotspot. (I'm sitting there now). Hopefully I have better luck in the sleeping and eating department in Bordeaux tonight. (At least I slept well, perhaps because I didn't get any 1 a.m. calls on my mobile from Australian radio stations like I did on Sunday night).

The setting of the run was pleasant - for an urban centre it has some very good beaches (and although I didn't get that far, the municipal golf course, on the end of a headland, looks spectacular). The run was a bit more mundane, sometimes settling pretty well on the flat but rather weak whenever I had to go uphill (which wasn't that often). Achilles again a bit touchy.

Not surprisingly most of the main Spanish sports paper (there were copies floating around on yesterday's bus) was devoted to Wimbledon (I was a little surprised that there wasn't an outbreak of horn-blowing - perhaps they're a bit more sedate in La Coruna). The obligatory football coverage was devoted to what appeared to be a tournament for teams representing immigrants to Spain. Either there are not many Chinese in Spain or they're not very good at football (or both) because China's record was 0 wins, 0 draws, 3 losses, goals for 1, goals against 42. Not surprisingly Morocco is doing well. Australia doesn't appear to be represented; the most famous Australian immigrant to Spain (now deceased) probably wouldn't have been much help to them even when he was alive.

C • happy birthday Blair! 3

First run since WMOC, an early morning session in La Coruna. Not much was happening on the streets at 6.45 which is no bad thing for a run. Nothing happens terribly early in Spain, and particularly so in a place which is effectively in a time zone 2 1/2 hours ahead of what it should be and so doesn't get light until close to 7 even in midsummer. It was raining lightly, which is fitting for one of the wettest parts of the country. (The rain in Spain doesn't fall on the plain - it falls mainly on exposed northern and western coasts like it does everywhere else at similar latitudes).

The first target of the run was the Estadio Municipal de Riazor, home of Deportivo Coruna, one of my several adopted European football teams - others, in addition to Norwich City, include 1860 Munich and Tromso IL. (The last of these introduced the world to Arctic football when they beat Chelsea in a blizzard in a 1997 Cup Winners Cup match (before losing the return leg 7-1), and more recently saw Viking traditions introduced to football when a supporter sacrificed a goat on the pitch before the season's last home game in the hope it would save them from relegation - it didn't).

After that came a circuit of the headland which the old town largely occupies, which was a lot of fun, particularly a couple of kilometres around the old lighthouse which is a park. This coastline is riddled with rocks and little coves, some of them holding beaches only a few metres long. (I'd have loved this place as a ten-year-old). Finished off with a bland stretch down the main drag back to the hotel, past a queue of people waiting for a government office to open. The run itself had its high and low points, and my Achilles was a bit more fragile than I would have liked (especially on the cobbles), but not a bad session on the whole.

Spotted a few signs of the local politics. Like some other parts of Spain, Galicia has its own separatist movement, although as far as I can tell, the only evidence of illegality carried out in its name, unlike its Basque counterpart, is the intermittent pilfering of the letter 'L' from public signs (La Coruna is A Coruna in Galician - bus destination signs sidestep the issue by just saying 'Coruna').

Spent the rest of the day on a bus along the north coast, a lovely trip with mountains on one side and coves and estauries on the other for much of the way. Now in Santander.

C • Canaries!?!? 3

A travel day up to north-western Spain, involving a couple of buses and slightly more convoluted connections in Porto than I was expecting.

I've long been drawn to the wilder Atlantic reaches of Europe - must be the Cornish blood. Previously I've spent time in the likes of Arctic Norway, the Outer Hebrides and Donegal, and am now adding Galicia to the list. No bleak windswept moorlands here though - parts of the country on the way through, with towering eucalypts, bracken and granite boulders, could easily pass for St. Helens (or Gippsland if you take away the boulders).

The place has a reputation as being something of a backwater, an impression not dispelled by Galicia's voters who took until 2005 before they got around to booting Franco's last cronies out of the provincial government, but like a lot of alleged backwaters it's a nice place to look at.

It was seventeen years ago that I last waited for the start of a world championship race with a chance at a medal. That time, the JWOC relay (where Grant had come in with the lead on the first leg), my hopes were to be dashed before I started. This time it was a more drawn-out process. In a sense it was a bit like one of my other big races of the year, the Canberra Marathon; a result (8th) that I would have taken at the start of the week, but one which promised so much more.

The terrain was quite different to the qualifiers and I didn´t handle the shift as well as I would have liked. We had an idea it would be a lot tougher when news came through that Nick Barrable (who´s still too young for this caper) had pre-run the course in 81. It was tougher, with a lot of steep dunes, especially in the middle, and thicker vegetation than the other days. (The qualifying maps had more green on them, but it was mostly in blocks and easily avoidable).

My start was reasonable, drifting a bit on 2 but with no real damage, so it was quite a surprise when Girts Lenins caught me at 5. This rattled me a bit at the time, although less so once it became apparent, after leaving the low-vis section from 6 to 9, that he was running much too fast for me and that if I tried to stay with him I´d blow up trying (he eventually won silver). Shortly after I felt like I was blowing up anyway on the toughest physical part of the course; I didn´t have the necessary strength to power up the steepest dunes well. From there it was a bit of a grind, hoping to keep hitting controls and find a second wind (which happened to some extent in the last third). I made my only significant mistake of the week at 17, a one-minuter, but came home reasonably well. I thought when I finished that it was probably an outer-edges-of-top-10 run and that´s what it turned out to be.

I would have liked something better than this - it was my worst run of the week, although the standard was pretty high. A medal would have been out of reach, though, even on a perfect day. Great result for Tash, and a pretty good day for Australia generally with eight top-ten places.

Now for the trip across to the Czech Republic, via northern Spain, stage 5 of the Tour and a couple of days in Paris.

C • Nice run 3

A fairly easy recovery run, although it didn't feel quite as good as Tuesday's equivalent - a bit iffy in the stomach at times. Hope this is a product of doing it too close to breakfast and not an indicator that I'm going to be sick for the big day. Spent the run around the top of Nazare again. One section felt like home because it was through an area of mature eucalypts (and one we'd love to have ourselves, sand-dune contours and no undergrowth). There have been patches of young eucalypts on the WMOC maps and even the odd isolated eucalypt mapped as a distinctive tree, something I haven't seen since the late and lamented Stony Creek/Arachnicopia in Canberra.

Elsewhere, my decade-long project to get historical results online now involves the last few missing Easters. I've recently been doing some work on Easter 1978. It may be of interest that 23 of the M21A field are still orienteering to my knowledge (two - Warren Key and Terry Farrell - are still running elite races), and the oldest age group contained a few creaky antiques running M56. Not sure if phatmax wants to enlighten us as to what happened after day 1. Another item of interest was the presence of one Derek Clayton, who at that stage still held the world marathon record, at 41st in M35A. Perhaps surprisingly he was around that place on all three days, although I suspect he would have won more than his share of splits had such things existed in 1978.

That Easter was at Turallo Creek, which was the scene of two of my more memorable events for very different reasons - the 1987 event where a permission stuff-up saw me chased off the area by shooters, and the best head-to-head race I've ever run, slugging it out with Jock Davis in 1991. We ran 16.2k in 77, the last 6 in 26, and Jock finally broke me by running the 1050m last leg in 3.10 (that's not a typo). I can't run that fast on an athletics track.

Another very good run with only a minor 15-second wobble at 18 preventing it from being as exceptional technically as yesterday. Didn't feel quite as good running as yesterday either, but that's splitting hairs. Again about 3-4 minutes off the pace. Felt as if I was losing concentration a little on the short legs at the end but got away without any significant time loss.

As was the case yesterday, there were short legs in the detail early and late and longer legs out the back in the middle in simpler terrain where vegetation changes were the main feature. This section wasn't as steep as yesterday and the long leg from 6 to 7 (2.5k across the map) didn't have much route choice at all - it was the Pauline Hanson leg, just give anything that wasn't white as wide a berth as possible - although there were some better route choice options on shorter legs after that.

Didn't place quite as well as yesterday, but still fifth overall in a closely bunched field. The imbalance between the two heats is quite remarkable with 9 of the 10 fastest times coming from our heat (the lengths were the same and winning times similar). That will suit me for the final, I think, as it will make it harder for packs to form with most of the best people spread by 4 minutes instead of 2. If I can stay on top of the wave for another day a par result on Saturday is probably somewhere between 4th and 8th; for a medal I'll need a very good run of my own and some help from one or more of the top three stuffing up.

C • Trust the qualification results? 2

Today is my 30th orienteering birthday - my first event was at the no-longer-standing Narrabundah Hill on 2 July 1978. My chief memory of that event was its abysmal weather - and a check of the observations showed that my memory wasn't flawed in that respect.

I celebrated this occasion by having what would have to be close to the most technically precise run I've had in technical terrain in those 30 years. It was the first long distance qualifier and my objective was to avoid making any significant errors. That was certainly achieved - the closest I came to a mistake all day was stopping for a couple of seconds because I couldn't see the flag which was on the other side of a tree. I was also running pretty solidly, although holding a little back on the steeper dune climbs - the fact that it wasn't quite a 100% physical effort will stop me rating this as one of my best runs ever, but I'm certainly pleased with it. Was it really only eleven days ago that I was jogging back to the finish in Norway, my confidence completely shattered after being unable to come to terms with the way the contours were simplified there?

It's always hard to know what to make of qualifying results because you don't know the extent to which your opposition is holding something back. I'm fourth behind three Swedes, none of whom featured in the sprint (and including two names I recognise - Klas Karlsson and Stefan Sandahl), three minutes off the lead. Going out six or seven from the end in the final would be a good position, I think, if these results are repeated tomorrow. Our heat certainly looks to be much stronger than the other one unless the courses were drastically different. The field also looks stronger than it was for the sprint (thanks to the aforementioned Swedes) and equalling or bettering my fourth from the sprint will not be easy, but it's been a good week so far and you never know what might be possible.

The area was decent and the mapping was good - none of the problems from Friday's map were in evidence today - although some of the control placements were fairly easy and there were a couple of legs with straightforward track options (not that the tracks are any faster than the white because they are often quite sandy).

Off the course, it's good to see that the Americans are up with the times - they've decided that after his 90th birthday it's about time they took Nelson Mandela off their list of known terrorists. Presumably he's a bit too frail these days to hijack any planes.

C • top work 1

A decent recovery run around the top of the escarpment of Nazare to the old clifftop village and back again. Achilles a little sore early on but settled after 10 minutes or so. Flowing nicely by the last couple of kilometres, only disturbed by an annoying dog, possibly the same one that's been intermittently waking us up on the last few nights.