Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

WMOC Sprint Final, 25th. Had hoped for a better place than this, but couldn't have done much more, and was quite pleased with the competitiveness of my time, 1.56 down on the leader, less than 1.30 from 2nd, and less than a minute from 7th. The long distance is the main game for me this week and those times are close enough to think that a top-10 on Friday is still a possibility, although it will need a very good run and perhaps a bit of help from others blowing up.

The area was easier than I'd hoped - a bit in the Neuchatel old town but nothing intricate. There were a few traps to avoid in the form of apparently good exits into dead ends, and some decent route choices, but on the whole it was a running race. There was a castle section at the end but that wasn't as complicated as the equivalent in the 2008 Portugal qualifier - its main function was to set up a route choice leg (which I thought was a no-brainer but the splits suggest it may not have been so obvious to others). Happy with my mental intensity, and with the way my running was going. No Achilles issues during the race. Nick Barrable won with 14.23.

Other major Australian results for those who missed them from elsewhere: Jenny and Hermann won, Tash was 2nd and Warren was 3rd. Carsten won M40. Tracy was 12th which I don't think she'll be especially pleased with.

The evening has had some natural fireworks to add to the artificial ones (it doesn't seem to have deterred the artificial ones).

My choice of eating places in Biel this evening was a bit of a Canberra throwback; next door to each other are Ottoman Cuisine and the El Rancho. In Canberra the former is a well-reputed place which has been host over the years to more than one episode of numbers-crunching; the latter is (or was) a somewhat more downmarket establishment which was a favoured haunt of Grammar Year 11/12s with questionable IDs, things which were easier to come by in the late 1980s because ACT drivers licences didn't have a photo in those days. (In Biel the situation is reversed - the El Rancho is a decent (if very slow) Mexican restaurant and Ottoman Cuisine is a dodgy-looking kebab joint). I have yet to see any trace of a Private Bin.

Event: WMOC 2010 - Pays de Neuchatel - Switzerland
 

Did the necessary in a pretty technically straightforward sprint qualifier, with a few route choice problems but no real fine navigation challenges - although a few people who hadn't read the program came to grief by misunderstanding a high bridge. Felt reasonable running without being brilliant, and handled the stairs OK - not that a qualifier is the place you want to have a flyer physically. (I did have a scare in the sprint qualifiers last year, although one big advantage this year is that I'd actually eaten in the 48 hours prior to the race this time). Achilles still a little touchy.

I was expecting Christoph Plattner (whom I'd regarded as the pre-event favourite) to come through me from two minutes back, but he didn't. Ended up in 15th place but only just over a minute down (although there were three significantly faster times in the other heat, on the same course). Realistically I'd be happy with a top-20 in the sprint and a top-10 in the long - the field is deeper than the last two years and I'm not in quite the same shape. On qualifying times I'm 28th combining the two heats, but the final should be a bit more technical which will suit me better; this was really a running race.

We were reminded after finishing that Swiss event organisation is not always as flawless as the country's reputation would lead you to believe (no-one who was at the 1996 World Cup will need much reminding of this) - someone had clearly neglected to work out how many download stations would be needed to handle the flow of competitors. The queue was around 20 minutes when I finished but blew out to an hour later on.

The opening ceremony was also a bit shambolic, but Switzerland hardly has a monopoly on that; it was somewhat unhelpful that the ceremony venue was a block away from the designated municipal firework-exploding place. For those not from the Territories who have forgotten what a good old-fashioned cracker night looks like, this weekend is it (Swiss National Day is tomorrow). Fireworks were being set off in other places too, including next to the fifth control while I was the process of punching it.

(I thought the fireworks might also make for a very disturbed night's sleep, but as it turned out more disturbing were the loud and continuous church bells at 6am - the Church obviously being an exception in a country where noise pollution is taken so seriously that using a washing machine on a Sunday is deeply frowned on in many quarters. Australia clearly has had a different attitude for some time as I found a 1910 newspaper article about an upheld noise complaint in Melbourne involving church bells).

WMOC model event at Le Prevoux. This is supposed to be the model event which represents the 'hard Jura' (long qualifier 2 and final), as opposed to the 'fas Jura' (qualifier 1). It was still easier going, I think, than France (to some extent this was expected because of the higher altitude). Not as many sinkholes as there were in France, but lots of small features in sometimes vague country. As always, model event day is about seeing what the map interpretations are like, and my scoreboard is:

Green/yellow: excellent, and unusually for central Europe, mapped to summer standard so if it's yellow it really is yellow, not yellow with medium green stripe.
Tracks: some of them are small, and a lot of them are muddy. Wouldn't count on seeing them when crossing - old walls are better for that.
Brown dots: tiny!
Black dots: also very hard to see at times - most of the boulders aren't very big and a lot are covered with moss.

The one concern of the day is that the ground is soft and my Achilles wasn't particularly comfortable pushing uphill on it. Hopefully that's a function of most of the climbing being early on a day when the first few controls were the warm-up.

The racing starts tomorrow: sprint qualifying in the evening, then the final the following day. The town where qualifying is looks pretty bland and I suspect it will largely be a running race, which would be a worry if qualifying in M35 was as brutal as it is in say, M60 (six heats, 14 qualifiers from each).

The public transport system is, unsurprisingly, working pretty well. I'm staying in Biel because I left it too late to get anything reasonable in La Chaux-de-Fonds or Neuchatel, but the way the program has turned out, apart from not having a sprint day at "home", it's almost as convenient a location as either of those two.

C • It's official ..... 6

Travelled to Wengen in the Jungfrau region yesterday. The forecast was not particularly brilliant but it ended up not being too bad - the cloud base was around 3500m, hiding the summits but still allowing plenty of impressive views from the train at Kleine Scheidegg, not least various waterfalls and glaciers and the north wall of the Eiger. The heavy rain started almost as soon as I left town (and proceeded to comprehensively soak me in Zurich).

We were in this part of the world, on the Grindelwald side, in 1981. This was where I first attempted to ski but remember the visit more for two other reasons - the boy who was running around the campground with a broken ski pole making a nuisance of himself to all and sundry and being referred to as the 'Grindelwald terrorist' (terrorism, of the Irish Republican and Italian Red Brigade variety, was much in the news at the time), and Cassie, who was four, reacting rather strongly to what was presumably the wine content of some fondue and treating us to much merriment for the rest of the evening.

Speaking of Cassie, now that it's out there in certain quarters I can mention in public something I've been sitting on for a couple of weeks - I'll be an uncle early next year.

As expected I was pretty stiff this morning, but this eased quickly and it turned into a better run than I was expecting - certainly more strength on the hills than I was expecting (and more than yesterday), not that the hills were as long as yesterday's were.

Zermatt is a place where one could burn a lot of money at a very fast rate (I saw a chalet for sale for roughly A$20 million), but I got a stellar Matterhorn view out my window for $85 a night. It was particularly stunning early this morning, which was completely clear, with the mountain in sunlight and the valley still in shadow.

Really tough mountain runs are not in short supply at Zermatt. I wasn't looking for a really tough mountain run but simply heading up the valley was enough of a challenge, with about 300m climb in 2km once past the end of the village. Levelled off a bit after that. Struggled at times on the steeper parts of the climb, reasonable after that, but didn't have a lot left in the final flattish section in the village coming back. The scenery was as good as you would expect, although there was still a bit of cloud around, which I expected would clear (and it did).

Part of the way along there was a policemen and various other people in fluoro vests above the river - I don't know if that means someone went into the river (it's the sort of river where going in is usually a one-way journey; do I recall correctly that somebody died this way during the multi-day event up here a few years back?). The "mountains toll" seems to occupy a similar place in the Swiss media during the summer to that which the road toll occupies in Australia (and seems to tick over at a similar pace). Among those who have not been added to it over the years were the two Germans who turned up in running gear with the apparent intention of running up the Matterhorn (they ended up finishing their trip in a helicopter) and the Slovenian snowboarder who tried to snowboard down the side and somehow survived a 700-metre fall after parting company with his snowboard halfway down.

The run was really only the prelude for the day, the main activity being walking the Hohbalmen Hohenweg - which takes you up to 2750m (with 1000+m climb in the first 4km) and provides a truly spectacular view of all the mountains. Definitely well worth doing on a day which had just about perfect conditions; the only negative was that my discomfort with heights meant I didn't make the most of the panorama on the highest part of the traverse, looking mostly at the path in front of me and not off to the side. (It is a well-trodden hiking path, but it's only a single-track, across a 60-degree slope with 800 metres to the valley below...).

This ended up being a hard day, perhaps too hard for four days out from WMOC (1800m of climbing, and perhaps more relevantly 1800m of descending). Don't seem to have destroyed my quads (although tomorrow morning may tell me more), but definitely pretty knackered. Somewhat to my surprise, my toe caused me no significant grief, either running or walking.

C • Wow 1

Used this run to clear a minor logistical hurdle, starting it from dropping the hire car off and thus saving myself a 25-minute walk back to the hotel. Dropped down initially to the river and then an out-and-back along it, with the 'back' section taking in the stretch where the later part of Friday's course was. A few niggles, most notably that my about-to-fall-off-for-the-last-month toenail now has an edge which digs into the flesh occasionally on downhills (more so walking than running, which may be an annoyance tomorrow), but not moving too badly. Steady light rain through the run, but it didn't persist through the day as I thought it might.

The rest of the day was devoted to travel, five trains' worth of it (all connections functioned smoothly, as you'd expect given that three of the four connections were Swiss). Now in Zermatt; I don't exactly have the place to myself but then it's popular for a reason. The top of the Matterhorn is in cloud tonight, but the forecast for tomorrow is excellent.