Training Log Archive: OJ

Nice steady orienteering session at Friazino from the Kostylevs' place. Ran with Egor, Gleb, Tania and Alia, with Tania leading us to random features in the forest which we had to identify. Friazino terrain is flat, bushy and vague, not to mention the fact that everything was covered in snow. The kinds of features that Tania was using tended to be micro-clearings that only Neil would map, rootstocks and indistinct veg boundaries. I got a lot of penalty points, but not as many as Egor, who was trying to do it without a compass.

A pre-breakfast exploratory run from my flat further out along the Setun to a bit of forest that looked quite promising in my Moscow min-atlas, but which ended up being a bit inaccessible. I got lost a couple of times and the run got a bit longer than I intended really. Back through Victory Park.

Lots of walking around in the freezing cold for the rest of the day, tired now!

Hill session out at Sparrow Hills, including a run out there via Lyzhniki and a run back along the embankment. 10x hill sprints up a snowy trail, then found a nice zig-zag tarmac path with lights to run up, and back down direct through the woods. 6x1.10 ish off 3 mins. Pretty good session all in all, and having checked the forecast for next week it was probably a good idea to get a decent session in today...

Really didn't feel like it this evening after a long and pretty fruitless day of peering into microfiche projectors. But I ran round my usual route staying in the untrodden snow as far as possible and really enjoyed myself. Sometimes running is the best therapy there is.

Warm up exercises in the gym at the Kutusovskaia Skaladrome.

And a weights session - lunges, half squats, full squats, bench press, etc.

Warm up and down on a treadmill and then a jog home. It made a change to be inside for a session, but I can't say I enjoyed it much...it's much more fun out in the cold and snow.

Had a bit of a climb in the bouldering wall after the gym session - I was feeling pretty tired by then, and it's a steep bouldering wall!

Home from the Tretyakov Gallery where I was working in the archive all day. Not a bad run, all the way along the Moskva, so only had to cross two roads in the entire run. Doing a point-to-point run like this in Moscow makes you realise just how enormous the city really is - I started near the centre, and I ended up just outside the inner ring, and still a long way from the edge. Cold and snowy, it was -8 this morning.

Pre-breakfast Vernon-esque tempo session along the Moskva. Started easy and wound the pace up. After a warm up I ran out in a sub threshold 26mins and back in a threshold 23 mins. Very cold this morning and feel quite smug about myself now.

It's snowing, and snowing, and snowing.

C • cooool!! 4