Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

This one promised to be an epic - the winning time was advertised as 98 and with yesterday 10% over most were expecting something around 105. Given my struggles in the terrain I was expecting to struggle to break 150, and wasn't entirely sure whether I was going to go the full distance.

Started reasonably well by my standards here, with a track route choice to 1 giving me the chance to settle down (this involved going up the hill to the start triangle and then straight back down it again; I was a bit surprised to see that the official positioned to make sure no-one took short cuts was none other than Cassie). I then overshot 2 after misinterpreting some green, but apart from that was navigating a lot better than the last few days (although still short of where I wanted to be).

Felt hamstring tightness on the way to 8 and it progressively worsened on the next leg - couldn't run with any fluency in the terrain. Had it been 30 minutes from home I'd probably have tried to press on, but only a quarter of the way in there was no point in doing so and risking turning a two-day injury into a four-week one. It feels similar to an injury I did on a training weekend at Wilsons Prom three years ago and that was OK within a few days, so hopefully that will be the same this time, with my next significant race eight days away. I may not have been hugely motivated for this one, but I'd hoped to at least get to the map change at 11k.

C • Tough day 3

C • Blair ready to unleash the FURY 24

Event: Norsk O Festivalen
 

I was hoping that it might be all right on the day, but it wasn't. I still haven't come to grips with pinpointing features here - understanding the internal logic of how the finer contours link, what's mapped and what's what - and couldn't hit a control to save my life, particularly early on. None of the mistakes were big - a minute or so was the worst - but when you're dropping 30-60 seconds on almost every control in a field in which you're already one of the slowest it's going to be a dismal day. Got a bit better later on but this was frankly pretty embarrassing. At least my running is a little more fluent. Definitely not a good return to this level of competition after eight years away.

I'm not sure exactly what my problem is here. I have a fairly reasonable record in Norway - at least compared to Sweden and Finland - so it must be something specific to this particular type of landform.

By the end the extent of my ambitions was not to come last; five people did even more dismally so that was "achieved".

Tomorrow will be very tough - 15.7km in similar terrain. I'm not sure that I'm going to do myself any favours by being out for 2 1/2 hours - plan is to see how I feel at the end of the first loop.

World Cup model event. Nicer on the top of the hills than it was yesterday - nowhere near as much of the deep shrubby stuff - but thick in between, almost primeval at times. Navigation again erratic - couldn't really get the hang of which cliffs were mapped and which weren't. Hopefully will do this better tomorrow.

At least I haven't managed to wipe myself out injured the day before the race like I have the last two times I've been picked for Australia.

The team leaders' meeting was more painless than I remember them being in the 1990s - we didn't even have anyone asking what the temperature of the water at the drinks controls was going to be.

The object of the exercise was to get confidence in Norwegian terrain and in that respect it was a miserable failure. Found the terrain very hard work - you have to fight for every contour (and there will be 140 of them to deal with on Saturday), and deep shrubs mean the flat bits between the rock provide no respite either - on top of the rock will be faster, I think, where it is an option. I suspect it might be easier in a sense if you're really attacking it, which I wasn't today. Navigation also indifferent, at its worst at 17 where I got confused by an unmapped track and lost confidence totally in a flat area, something which used to happen to me a lot more in Scandinavia than it does now.

Took a rather unusual fall down a steep slope out of 2 - went for a slide but caught the inside of my left knee on a small tree while going down. At speed I imagine such a contorted position would be the fast road to the knee surgeon, so it may be as well that I wasn't going very fast.

Just to add to the cheery mood, it started pouring in the last 15 minutes.

Reinforcement of stereotypes time: I arrived back to see a car was parked next to mine, containing a couple who made me wonder what the Norwegian for 'bogan' is. Both were smoking, the man had tattoos covering most of both arms, and there was a Valerenga scarf stretched across the dashboard. (Valerenga are a football team of the no-one-likes-us-and-we-don't-care variety, from one of the less salubrious parts of Oslo).

C • The Oslo equivalent of Coll... 3

A pretty solid afternoon's work on the tracks on the west side of Holmenkollen - certainly jumped in at the deep end by climbing to the top of the Olympic slalom course in the first 20 minutes. I don't think I've done a hill as long as that since Asheville, although I wasn't running in snow this time (still a few lingering patches on north-facing slopes though). The rest of it wasn't exactly flat either, and as expected in Norway the single-track bits were pretty rough - not much mud but some very rocky bits.

Suffered a bit early through taking on a big hill before being properly warmed up, but otherwise a pretty good effort. Feeling it a bit at the end, probably as much from the descents as the climbs. Will go back into the terrain tomorrow.

Saw a 1999 quote from George W. Bush today in which he described his perfect day as involving running, fishing, watching sport on TV, followed by dinner with a few friends with Van Morrison in the background and in bed by 10. It's a bit scary that I have a greater than 50% overlap with this (delete the fishing, substitute intelligent and stimulating conversation for Van Morrison, and push the 10 out to 10.30).

Interested to see that the Australian athletics team's decision to come in from Hong Kong at the last minute is attracting some controversy. I've known about it for a while and think Hong Kong isn't a bad choice on climatic grounds (for temperature/humidity, a normal July day in Hong Kong is a bad one in Beijing), although I'd probably have gone for southern Japan myself because Hong Kong wouldn't be the easiest of places to train (lots of great runs but most very steep, which probably isn't what an Olympic aspirant in the final pre-competition phase is looking for). I would, however, dispute that there's 'nowhere to run' in Beijing - I found that it had more options than Seoul (although the one option in Seoul is a good one) and was less hair-raising than Hanoi.

(I've previously put together some material on Beijing's climate for the AOC, but didn't have any involvement in the choice of Hong Kong).

A slow run from the Olympic Stadium youth hostel in Helsinki. The plan was to revisit the tracks through the finger of forest which runs almost into the central city from the north (a favourite haunt from my 2006 visit), although that didn't quite work out as planned because a critical freeway overpass was closed due to roadworks. Still a nice place to run, even if I had to contend with peak hour traffic - on mountain bikes.

The run wasn't as good as the surrounds; horribly sluggish and stiff for the first 20 minutes, but improved considerably after that. A reminder that yesterday was a hard day's work. At O-ringen we'll have to come up for a middle distance the day after the long, which will be a challenge (and then there's the non-World Cup last day which is described in the event information as being so soft that it's like running through deep snow).

Flew across to Oslo this afternoon (currently typing this using the wireless access in an Oslo library while waiting for Jim (of Oslo, not Bendigo) to finish work). I'll be here up until the World Cups this weekend; some training, some relaxing and even a bit of work - I'm dropping in to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute tomorrow to find out how countries that get a lot of snow measure the stuff properly. (I'm currently doing some work on trying to quantify the extent to which our automatic stations in the mountains under-report snow and have come up with tentative numbers in the 50-70% range).