Training Log Archive: Rosstopher

Attempted to head to the Wednesday night orienteering race, the UOF cup event, that Niklas was organizing tonight, but my foot wasn't happy and discretion is the better part of valor.

Instead I watched them head out into the wilds of Nåsten then trudged home to make dinner and listen to Wait Wait before the roommates got back.

Foot feels just a little bruised, enough to make a normal running stride too painful but I have hopes that it will resolve quickly. Walking in my street shoes hurts too, so I think this is unrelated to orienteering or last week... probably more likely stepped hard on a pebble and am kind of a wuss.

C • Ouch 3

Tisdagsbana H. I was running behind schedule, as is quite normal, so I headed off on the loop alone, hoping to catch up to Boris's group since I suspected he was on the 10 or the 12 k loop. Foot was hurting a bit, I had noticed it as I was coming home from work, walking in my flats, and potentially this was enhanced by my wearing of a new pair of Icebugs that I wanted to break in.

Coming back to the snow after a week in the sun was mentally tough :) Running felt okay at first, but on the uneven snowpack my foot was aching more and more. I was not making up ground on the pack of headlamps in front of me.

I did meet up with Boris where the 12 and the 10 intersect, but I wasn't moving well enough to stay with his group, and after swinging back through Hågadalen again I bee-lined it straight back to KG, just happy to take off my shoe.

Glad that I did make it out and exercise, but think it would have been smarter to stay on the roads or make it to the gym. Still, there is value in toughing out a session and the reward was sauna and soup :)

Recovery day. Getting back into the swing of things in Sweden. Still a bit weak after the 24 hour illness of yesterday. Good to be back at work though.

Travel day. Not a great end to the otherwise pretty awesome camp. Woke up early as we had a 5:20am trip to the airport to fly home. Felt awful, extremely nauseous, with a headache, fever, and just tired and generally sick. This was the theme of the day through the various types of transportation, until we finally made it home in the early afternoon where upon I promptly fell face first back into bed and continued to feel miserable until about 6am the next day. Then poof, it was mostly over.

So the Turkey training camp comes to a close and I think it was a great success. Many thanks to Boris for floating the idea and to Sam for being an organized responsible liaison for the whole club.

It was great to hang out with our mostly Linné crew of old friends and new. We trained hard, rested hard, and played a lot of games together.

I count 326 controls and 120k in 14.5 hours. I had a great result in the first day of the competition, a 20th place in the middle distance and, more than anything, this result gives me a great deal of confidence moving forward into the coming season.

I did manage to get a minor injury to my rib, which limited my training a bit, but I think I was successful at training through the pain but also respecting my body's limits.

2013 is off to a good start.

C • sounds great!!! 1

C • Excellent work in Turkey. V... 1

C • Good run on your first day ... 2

Thinking to work my way back into being alive and healthy. Ran to work, well slow run and lots of coughing along the way. Feels good to move the body, but everything is sore and tired and even a short run feels pretty taxing.

And the run home in the evening. Definitely on the mend, but not quite there yet. Required a little bit of a nap on the couch after the 15 minute slow run home. No rockgympa or innebandy tonight.

One of the healthiest mammals living in our apartment just now though.

C • Healthy mammals 1

Support car for the skaters. Driving to drop off and pick up the intrepid skating crew. It looked really fun, but it also seemed really cold.

Still a bit sickly, but I was really excited about going downhill skiing with my labmates at Kungsberget. It's a tiny little mountain, but it was a fun experience and I liked skiing down the snow park section, even if I was too chicken to go off any of the jumps.

The runs were all short enough that it didn't ever seem like strenuous exercise, and I didn't end up feeling all that sick. Hurray.

Recovered enough that I thought it might be good to head into work. The bike ride over was an indication that I was not really recovered fully. Even a small exertion is enough to feel exhausted.

Still very sick.

More sick (or is that more sicker) today than yesterday. Used WebMD to look up the difference between a cold and a flu. I felt unequal to the task of deciding which I have, but I didn't do much much else today. Listened to podcasts because then I didn't need to lift my head so far off the pillow.

Only thing I'm really excited about is eating ice cream... so that's a win at least.

C • you know what they say.... 1

A tickling cough on Monday turned into a more extensive cough overnight. Woke up feeling sick and contagious, so I spent the day at home. Frequent naps and fluids.

Sadly, skipping the Tisdagsbana of the Tour de Linné tonight, and with the aim of not spreading any disease, also skipping soup night afterward.

C • Krya på dig! 2

Quickroute
Splits

Tonight's training was a bit more frantic than I had hoped. It is the first stage of the famous Tour de Linné and that meant an SI sprint first and a delayed rockgympa class to follow, starting at 7pm.

However, the experiment at work went quite late, and I wasn't able to extricate myself until 6, then I rushed home to get dressed and then rushed out towards the arena in the hopes that I would still find some people there.

I snagged a map from Anders as we crossed paths and arrived at the start just before the controls were to be picked up. I was a bit frazzled at the start but glad to have a chance to race. Should have taken the time to find some loose descriptions, as I had my holder and I lost a bunch of time on 9 when I guessed the wrong side of the fence.

Even without my mistakes I would have been the slowest out there, but I am pleased with many of my routes and tenth out of ten starters is better than arriving 5 minutes after all the controls had been gathered.

Jogged backward picking up controls until I met Elisa and then we biked home. Wasn't organized enough to join in for the last bit of Rockgympa and if last year is any indication... the tour week is brutal enough that making sure to rest enough is a good idea.

This entry is entitled: Ice Skating is Fun !

Really fun actually. I was nervous at first, because I'm not very coordinated really and sports that rely heavily on balance are not my thing. However, everyone we know has been telling us how much fun it is to go ice skating on the lakes around here, and so we decided that we needed to prioritize this and give it a shot.

This meant that we choose to skip an orienteering session in the forest, which is a hard thing to give up, and in fact when I read the logs of people that did the Nåsten training I feel a bit like I missed out.

We arrived down at the lake amid swarms of other skaters. We got lucky to get a spot right next to the water as another car was just leaving. Elin and Henrik had lent us skates their skates, which clip onto our ski boots and Boris, Alli, Sam and I headed out onto the ice at just before noon.

The sun was up, and the ice was beautiful. I spent the whole three hours staring just in front of my feet, trying not to trip or fall, and I therefore got to look at a lot of ice. It's pretty cool to see the range of cracks and bubbles and different patterns in the ice. I stopped to take a lot of photos and would have stopped even more if it was easier to take off my mittens and fish out the camera.

I was by far the slowest in our quartet, but because the conditions were right and we could skate anywhere at all on the whole surface of the lake, it was easy for people to loop ahead and then swing back to join up with me again.

At first I was tentative and tottering, and the first 20 minutes my shins were in agonizing pain, just unused to the motion of skating. But then things felt much more fluid and comfortable. There was even a section of really smooth ice when we were heading downwind where I hit a speed of 2:45/k.

All in all, I think that I really really love this activity and would like to get better at it. I felt like if I could improve my balance a bit, then I could really push harder, bend my knees more and really glide on each stroke. At the end of 3 hours I was starting to get tired but I would also have been happy to keep going for a couple more hours out on the ice.

Beautiful day, basically a perfect outing.

C • Thanks! 7

C • Pacing 6