Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

It occurred to me on the way to the start that this 5-days was roughly the equivalent of an Easter, with the addition of a middle distance on Easter Thursday. It sounds hard when you put it like that; perhaps they weren't great thoughts to have before starting.

The talk before the start (which was a fairly late one for me) was that today would be a bit faster than yesterday, although this was based on the fairly flimsy evidence of an apparently fast time from a local (the only one running M21E, although I suspect most of the organisers are drawn from that demographic) whose fast time turned out to be attributable to his failure to visit all of the controls. In fact the first part of the course, in heavy karst, was slower than anything yesterday, and I didn't make a good job of it, losing 2 minutes at 4 and wobbling nervously on 5 without actually making a mistake.

6 was a long leg and featured my best few minutes of the day; I took a road option with a big climb at the end and ran it, all 20 contours of it, putting at least a minute into a Norwegian in the process. It felt strong and encouraging but it may not have been wise; it turned out I was burning the last fuel I had. I gave the minute back through a questionable route on the next leg (and it turned out the Norwegian wasn't running my course anyway), and while it was another 40 minutes before I really started to fade away, it was a grind from then onwards. By 15 I was seeing Nicholas Mulder on a crossover and realising that he had taken significant time out of me, and by the second-last leg I was pretty much gone, something demonstrated by the Danish M55 (or thereabouts) who blew me away on a not-particularly-steep uphill track.

Somewhat surprisingly after a mediocre run at best, it was my best placing of the week (14th) and lifted me to 16th overall. One of those I overhauled was Greg, who started 43 seconds ahead of me (a chasing start might have been interesting); he must have had a bad one. Like the last couple of Easters, I wasn't able to finish it off on the last day, but this was probably tougher (both because of the extra day and the significantly longer last day) so there may still be signs of progress.

Left in a bit of a hurry afterwards as I had a 5.45 flight out of Zagreb and wasn't sure what the motorway traffic into the city would be like on a Sunday afternoon (minimal as it turned out - the Croatian summer holidays haven't really got going yet). Made a connection in Zurich I wasn't particularly confident about and ended up in Oslo, late enough to see tangible evidence that it does get dark there occasionally in midsummer. (I also saw my first rain of the trip).

C • Amnesia 2

Yesterday's map had a special symbol for living places of brown bears. As far as I know no-one saw one, and the bears may have good reason for being shy: among the offerings at the place where I ate last night was 'bear paw with dried fig' (not something I would have expected to see on a menu this side of Guangzhou).

Over the last 18 months my confidence in my ability to handle long races has not been what it should be, mainly because I haven't really run a good long (90+ minutes) race since the 2009 Australian Championships. My confidence was particularly lacking coming into this, the longest day of the Croatia Open (and with an expected winning time of 80-90) - I can't remember the last time I was as nervous about this for a race, in a 'can I really do this?' sense rather than a 'can I get the result I'm looking for?' sense.

The warm-up, with soreness in both Achilles and hamstring, didn't help - although at least the conditions were again kind - but a wide track route choice on the first leg helped to settle me down (on a day when in general the long legs seemed to work reasonably well for me) and from then it turned into a reasonably normal race. It wasn't, though, to be a great navigational performance, with 2-3 minutes lost on a short leg at 7 in vegetation I couldn't quite make sense of. I got another boost around 10, a crossover point on the most obvious route choice, when I saw both Greg and Jamie and concluded I was close to the former and well ahead of the latter.

14 was a long leg with one major climb before the short final section. By now the muscles weren't quite right - they weren't quite right all day - and there were a couple of small mid-leg technical wobbles, but the engine was running reasonably well and for the first time in a while I was finishing a long race off physically. The disappointment was that I couldn't finish it off technically with a silly 2-minuter at 17, mistaking a cliff line for a track. (We don't often run on 1:15000 these days, especially in technical terrain, and I think my eyesight is starting to revert from well-above-normal to normal).

I can't call this a great run - no run with 5 minutes of mistakes is a great run (although Annichen Kringstad still managed to win WOC at Kooyoora despite exploring large parts of the state of Victoria during the course of her run) and my placing was only marginally better than on the earlier days. It will, however, do something for my confidence in being able to handle more races like this - especially as I didn't feel as shattered afterwards as I did after, say, Mount Ainslie.

The organisers do a good job of mixing the terrain up here. This time it was depressions again, but this time in largely flat terrain with no rock, and few features larger than a contour. I've come horribly unstuck on flat technical terrain on numerous occasions in Europe and was therefore very cautious, particularly early before I gained confidence in the mapping of the green and yellow (both excellent and both good features). Never really felt like I was being aggressive but there's something to be said for running at the speed you can navigate; my only mistake of any size was a 90-seconder when my plan to run along a track to its end fell foul of the elephant track off its end being as prominent as the original track. A little further up the list than on the first two days; running against the big boys is definitely a challenge, although I suspect at some point tomorrow or Sunday (both long days, particularly tomorrow) I'm going to wonder whether I should have run M40. Achilles starting to get a bit troublesome in the absence of calf massages since being away, although so far it's been OK once warmed up.

The heatwave broke today and running conditions were quite pleasant, particularly at 750m altitude - low 20s.

There are numerous assembly area features you won't find in Australia. One was the flying fox extending right across the assembly area, unsurprisingly a massive hit with the under-12s. Another was the beer tent (I doubt the concept of a 'liquor licence' exists in this part of the world), and a third was the music over the PA system - not so much the fact that it existed but what they were playing, including the version of 'Living Next Door With Alice' which includes the chant 'Alice! Alice! Who The F*** is Alice!'. I last encountered this, of sorts, at the (in)famous Australia-Iran World Cup playoff in 1997 when, in the dying moments, the Iranian supporters started chanting 'Allah-e-Akbar' (God is Great) and Bay 13 responded in its inimitable style with 'Allah! Allah! Who The F**** Is Allah!'. I'm surprised it didn't start a riot.

Jenny started on the journey home this morning. Hopefully it will be less of an epic than the trip to Europe, the likes of which hasn't been seen since 1991 and Grant's attempts to get home from JWOC - he was supposed to be on Yugoslav Airlines which was grounded by UN sanctions, and ended up going through Jordan (where he almost got arrested for going onto army land during a run).

C • Singapore is where I am currently... 2

Sprint in the town of Krk. I'd looked forward to this sprint - a good Mediterranean old town sprint is something pretty special. This one was a bit easier than I expected and only spent half the course in the old town (mainly because it wasn't very big), but still good fun, despite once again not having much uphill strength, and didn't miss anything although one of my routes was a bit questionable. Again about 2/3 of the way down the field.

We had a fair idea only half the course was going to be in the old town before the start because all the control descriptions were issued in advance (a blast from the past) and could see the spectator control was 10 out of 20. Comparing notes before we started, I noticed that Laura Robertson had a common stretch with me from 4 to 7. I hit 4 not too far behind her and wasn't gaining much, if anything, at the time on running speed, but she didn't quite register where the common stretch ended because she did a brief stunned-mullet imitation when I turned off to 8...(Like most of the substantial NZ junior contingent here, she's doing very well).

It was once again hot (mid 30s) and humid and I was glad it was only a sprint, but there is a lot to be said for an assembly area on the beach, which was an open invitation for people to spend time in the water before the race and after the race and, in the case of one of the Edinburgh Uni contingent, during the race. (The IOF Event Adviser in me was thinking of the various grounds on which he could have been disqualified, the spectator in me was thinking it was the best entertainment of the day).

Event: Croatia Open
 

First day of the Croatia Open and a challenging one it was, in what was described as 'extreme karst' - heavy limestone rock in many places (many of the spurs were almost unrunnable) and lots of depressions and cliffs. Hard to go much under 15 min/km in the midst of it; there were tracks but they were often obscure (I even lost one on the way to 6). Started to open out a bit more in the second half, which was also mostly downhill.

I had no running fluency in the terrain at all, and also struggled for any sort of uphill strength, but gradually got into it and even more or less enjoyed it. Running M21E this week and was about 2/3 of the way down but not totally embarrassed (the winner was just under 35).

Slightly more pleasant conditions because of the 700m altitude - probably high 20s.

As an act of tourism this was a very interesting run, along the shoreline into the old town of Zadar, taking in the town's most unique feature - the 'sea organ' (where a system of pipes has been set up in the seawall to produce musical notes depending on the movement of the water). Quite stunning. As a run it was very ordinary; the heat is still proving a struggle. I'm glad the Croatia Open is mostly at high altitude (except for the sprint).

Most of the rest of the day was spent on a neighbouring island (or in its adjacent water, which was very pleasant).

The World Junior Sailing Championships are in town and we ran into a couple of teams on the bus. My T-shirt (the one with the climate charts on it) seemed to attract quite a bit of attention.

The Plitvice Lakes National Park is as stunning as I'd been led to believe from those who had been there before WMOC - sinkholes, lakes, waterfalls, and above all the most stunningly clear water (and the greatest quantity of visible fish) I've seen anywhere. This might have been a very promising scene for a run but wasn't - the park trails were largely boardwalks and not really suitable for running, and getting anywhere from where we were staying would have involved 3km on a busy highway, so I decided to swap a planned rest day from tomorrow to today.

It's clearly an attraction of largely foreign interest (perhaps the locals stay away in peak season). In the car park (amongst the trees and reminiscent of orienteering events) probably no more than a quarter of the cars had Croatian plates and a lot of those would have been hire cars. I couldn't even get away from Australians in the restaurant; on another occasion I might have been tempted to get involved in the conversation at the next table, but I didn't come to Croatia to get into an argument about the carbon tax.

We finished at Plitvice around lunchtime and spent the rest of the day travelling on to Zadar, through an increasingly stark landscape. It seemed a routine drive of a couple of hours and it was hard to imagine that less than twenty years ago, this is the region that gave the world the expression 'ethnic cleansing' (first when the Serbs, who were the pre-war majority, threw the Croats out at the start of the war, then when the Croats repaid the favour with interest at the end). The only real sign of those events was the occasional abandoned building.

Scored nicely in the accommodation department at Zadar - after a couple of attempts drew a blank, we got an apartment with two bedrooms and, perhaps most importantly, a washing machine. Our next fallback was going to be the nearby youth hostel; perhaps we did well to avoid it as later in the evening we saw a Contiki bus parked outside.