Training Log Archive: Rosstopher

SI question. If I don't have an induction core to couple the master station to the units from which I want to read out the memory, what works as a good replacement?

I tried to use my keys and that failed, and then I tried nothing at all, and I managed to get just read out the download station and not the unit I had been trying to couple.

This may be moot because the units will be wiped clean sometime tomorrow, but if I get to them in the morning I might be able to do something.

C • Huh? 6

Sam says I should link blog entries to my Attackpoint log. She's been working hard on documenting our stay here in Uppsala.

just ensuring that Sam keeps feeding me

C • Tophers! 12

Jogging from the parking to the start.

Click on the image to view the Quickroute file in my DOMA archive (Thanks Mats for writing good software)

A fine day for orienteering. The Blodstensvägen ladies suggested that I should go to the training tonight, so I biked down after work to do some orienteering intervals. There was a nice crowd, and 9 men started together.

The faster guys waited for me every few controls, which was nice. I am getting better at running straight on these maps, but I still have plenty of work to do. The little inset that I show above is indicative of my whole course. I would be moving along with confidence, and then see a feature and be completely surprised, and slow down to figure it out.

C • Nice 1

Back to the bikes. Scrambled around in a tree liberating apples for the hungry people below.

To the clubhouse with Sam. Lovely day, legs are pain free.

Warming up on the forest loop just south of the clubhouse. Legs are also completely empty. Just barren husks that used to have muscles and energy but today they just felt wrung out. The warmup felt like a workout.

So the plan was 5 sets of (3mins, 2, 1) with 1 minute between intervals and 2 minutes between sets.

I ran off the very tail end of the men's group tonight, doing my best to coax some speed out of the legs. Felt good, just increda-slow. Luckily the club does intervals such that after each piece the group reforms before setting out on the next one.

After 3 sets everyone quit except for Olle, Micke, Oskar and me, and we gamely continued on. I was proud of our little group, and Micke even had enough energy to continue the last 1 minute interval until the top of the next hill.

I figure intervals with tired legs will build mental toughness.

Ran home, pallaed två äpplen, and then had a fantastic dinner with the Blodstensvägen orienteering group. Sam made risotto, Elisa made apple bread and Lisa and Sebastian made kladdkaka. I made it disappear :)

Half Marathon Mondays. So last year the men's team ran a half marathon every Monday at a pretty good pace, and it was very popular. Mats decided that it was time to restart that tradition, so I joined in with the group. This time it was Mats, Rassmus, Henrik and me. My plan was to keep up as long as possible and then to finish on my own.

This plan worked nicely. My legs were tired to be sure, but they were able to push from our starting pace of ~4:15/k until we got to be going about 3:55/k, and I really like running with the faster group.

Rassmus had gone on ahead and Mats had a plan of waiting until the 13k mark before chasing him down, so at 13 k I said goodbye, and almost immediately slowed way down. I then got confused and lost (inexplicably) in Gamla Uppsala and in the process added about 2 k and an extra hill to the route.

Super excited about next week's run, but I'm hoping my legs feel better so I can keep up longer :)

The club put on a local meet, and for most of the day Sam and I just sat around enjoying the atmosphere and distracting our friends that had jobs/responsibilities at the meet.

After it was over we asked to help get some controls. I chose to jog instead of bike, slowly to be sure, out to get the 8 flags I was assigned. I figured that the running would help the legs recover a bit.

Unscrewing SI units from stands is less fun when the mosquitoes are out.

Lidingöloppet

This was my first bit of Swedish tourism. What better way to experience a culture than to join in on the largest XC race in the world. So at 9am, Sam and I got picked up by Kristina and her boyfriend Mats to get a ride down to Stockholm.

Lidingö is a large island near the center of Stockholm, and the Lidingöloppet is a large running race that has been run since 1965, when it was created to mirror the successful Vasaloppet ski race. (or so I learned from reading wikipedia).

Another clubmate, Micke, decided not to run the race and he offered his race number and position up for sale and I grabbed the opportunity ... and sadly left the race packet on the coffee table in the morning. Luckily it wasn't necessary to present the form, just to recall the # (352) and then we were shuttled directly from packet pickup into the sports shop and other vendor area. I really needed to pee, so getting caught in the molasses stream of traffic winding through the hall was a special kind of torture.

There was a 2k jog to the start line, and so once we got ready, Kristina and I followed the hordes and the green streamers up to the starting field. We both had numbers in the 1B start bloc, which means we were only one start line back from the elites. The weather was ideal, blue skies warm and not a cloud, which made the vista of hundreds of runners warming up in this bucolic pasture even more scenic.

The gun went off and I drove forward, wary of getting caught in the bottlenecks ahead in the midst of all the other runners. Right away I could tell that my calves and quads hadn't recovered from Thursday's intervals and there was going to be a dull ache for the next couple of hours :) Nothing too bad though, I was more conscious of trying to jockey for space... I had used the race time calculator that Dad made for me, and decided that the best case scenario would have me running 3:45/kilometer... I was stuck though and even though the start was downhill my garmin was reading a pace of 4:10. This was frustrating because my goal was 2 hrs so I needed to average 4:00, and this was the easy part.

The first few k were very busy, but things started to spread out soon and then I was only running three abreast on some really smooth and beautiful forest paths. Gently rolling terrain and lots of twists and turns in the trail made for very fun running. It was about here that I decided to pull over for a quick pee break, as I decided that the feeling wasn't going away and that I had a long time until the race ended, better to take care of it now and not have to worry about getting a stitch from it. So many people passed me in that 20 seconds!

I settled in and just concentrated on running and making sure that my splits were fast enough. I would pack up with other runners for little stretches of a time before they would pull ahead or drop behind, but I tried not to be too competitive with them because I was aware that the last half of the race was going to be super hard, no need to burn out early. I was going great on the ups and downs... taking quick small steps on all the little bumps and really striding it out on the downs. I was making up a tonne of places on those sections and getting passed on the flats again. Luckily there wasn't too much flat :)

Came through the section near the assembly area (~8k) and was really impressed by the human tunnel that formed from all the spectators cheering. Still on my pace for 2 hrs, but just barely, and starting to realize that I was going to be over. Tried not to let it affect my morale, and just repeated my two new Swedish phrases "rulle ut och rulle på" and "rulle hatt." The first is from a kid's book we borrowed from my co-worker meaning roll out and roll on. The second is an old fashioned idiom meaning let's party!

It was about 20k when the race turned into a test of survival, and I just was working hard to not hemorrhage time. I had a little group of people just ahead and I told myself to not let them go because they were my group.

There is a famous hill on the course, akin to heartbreak hill for the boston marathon, called Abborrbacken (Abborre is the Swedish word for the fish Perch) and even though it was only 40 meters of climb, at 25k into the race it seemed daunting. I was waiting for it though, and I think I attacked it really well. It helped that there was a band playing music at the top ( actually there was a lot of music on the course, from gospel singers, to drum groups, and cover bands playing Bon Jovi, along with some seriously pumped up speakers in the backyard of one Swedish family).

Now, with only a couple of k to go to the finish line I was starting to get passed by all those people that are good at "pacing" and it's so hard to see that happen. I was losing my ability to keep up, and also other aspects of my physical coordination, as at the very next water stop I managed to knock aside/drop two cups of poweraid before successfully grabbing a cup of water and accidentally dashing about half of it in my face (and not the mouthpart of my face).

With just over 2 k to go, I came across Kristina's boyfriend Mats cheering loudly, and that gave me a little surge of energy and a sense that maybe I could speed it up a little. This new energy did nothing to stop the people streaming past me, but I was also overtaking a few unlucky souls that had paced even worse than me. With about 1 k left a speedy woman came past like I was tied to a post, and brought a posse of hangers-on with her. I watched her disappear ahead but the knowledge that the running would stop at the finish line motivated me to drop the proverbial hammer and finish as strong as I could. As I came out of the woods I realized that I was in the finish chute, I also spied the woman up ahead and thought that perhaps I had enough time left to outsprint her across the line.

I dug deep and had a fantastic sprint in, but it would not have been enough... except that she was apparently the first woman finisher and she was hindered by having to get a wreath placed over her as she crossed the line. I'm not so chivalrous as to let this lady go first, so I snuck in just ahead of her, and just under 2:03.

Kristina was just behind me (5th woman, ~2:07). Other notable results from the club were Josef ~1:54, and Ulf ~1:55.

Such a cool race, and I certainly need to come back and try for 2 hours some other year when my legs aren't so dead going into it. Sam was jealous that she didn't get to run ( but she was a fantastic cheering section).

After the racing adrenaline left, I felt pretty tired and nauseous, but now several hours later, after eating Mari's leftover curry and about 45 minutes of salad, I feel like a real boy again.

C • Nice race 11

Over to the clubhouse.

Warming up before the intervals. From the clubhouse to the Stadskoggen. We were running on the lighted track, and there was a pretty full house.

Intervals were 1min-2-3-4-5-5-4-3-2-1 with the corresponding rest interlaced 1-1-1-2-2-2-2-1-1. Our lead pack was super fast tonight, and keeping up with Lucas, Mats, Henrik and Oskar was untenable. I felt pretty tired and was pushing myself to keep up with Johan. Got slower and slower (or others got faster and faster) as the intervals progressed, but happy with the effort.

I know I'm going to feel this workout over the weekend.

After the intervals ran straight home to shower and head back over to work for beer club. Beer club was super fun, and I convinced Sam to come along too, so now she knows some of my work peeps.

Jogging over to Nåsten to run a course from the upcoming weekend. The woods were wet, but it wasn't raining so I call that a win. It's good to take advantage of the controls in the woods and the excellent courses.

Woah, it only took about 5 minutes out in the forest before I felt super tired and drained by the last couple of days and the swamps. Also getting to work at 7 :)

But training while tired might be relevant for the upcoming SM-Ultralong event that Sam and I just signed up for.

I did an okay job orienteering mostly, just dragging a bit energy-wise, but there were sections where I was very much fighting my compass. I really like this map though, there are a lot of microterrains in the mix when you go out into the woods.

Running back home after the course. I was proud of my chimpanzee roots and the ability to problem solve on the way back. The problem was I wanted an apple but the apples were too high in the tree. The solution was picking up a rotting apple off the ground and throwing it up to knock a ripe one down.

Jogging over to the start of the prerunning with Boris and Sam. The club was prerunning the many many courses that have been prepared for the local meet this coming Sunday. Just about 600 people have preregistered in some 60 + classes.

Pre-running one of the courses. I had a blast, orienteered pretty well, but also got very lost in one section. Relocating after wandering uselessly through some marshes.

Getting more used to running on this type of terrain.

Cool down with Mats and Henrik :). We visited some Hitta.ut points in the woods. My mnemonic string of words was:

Patrick Higgins says quack, Ross observed, looking cool. Hyenas eat everything rare, oddly polite. Voracious ostrich feeding frenzy. Quality control very good.

I think I was getting hungry because a lot of the words that came into my mind were eating related. Luckily Sam made a fantastic dinner!

Pressed for time so less of a warmup than normal. Boris asked if I was aiming for a fast time, and I decided that I wasn't really, but I knew that I would probably be running a bit faster than Boris and Sam.

Very pleased with tonight's effort. The rain left the woods a bit slippery, and the last three days of racing had left my legs a bit empty feeling, but heading down the first slope I felt pretty strong so I tried to keep up a good pace. Came through the halfway at 12:36 so I made another concerted effort to push a little bit harder on all the sections (downhill, uphill, flat ) and was happy to finish under 27. I don't think any faster would have been possible with the racing of the weekend.

Running back to Boris's office to retrieve stuffs. Then biking to food and home. Sam's bike had gears, my bike had heavy foods, so it's lucky that Sam waited for me at the top of the hill :)

Janne's backbana in Uppsala - Splits

SM relay - I got a chance to run on a Linné team, as many people dropped out because of feeling a bit sick or a bit injured. Swedish racing culture is quite different in this way, as even a slight sore throat or cough will make a Swedish orienteer quit a race or choose to quarantine themselves so as not to infect their teammates. But I was thrilled, none the less, to get a chance to race.

I ran third leg, on the club's fourth team with Johan Hamelius, and Olof Eriksson racing the first two legs. 114 teams signed up in total and we wanted to finish higher than our bibs (46th) because we thought that was how the team placed last year (in actuality, there were only three teams the year before). We finished 72nd.

Johan had a great lead leg, passing off just in front of our 2nd and 3rd teams, and Olle was going quite strong through the spectator control but lost a lot of time on one leg near the end. He handed off to me, apologizing, at about the same time that Taby and Roslagen went out.

The course was super fun, and I ran pretty well. I had no big mistakes, but near the end of the course I ran right past my number 18, and bobbled number 20 by getting into the wrong broad reentrant. I was running in the woods with the Taby runner for the first half, but my blunders near the end added up and he finished a couple of minutes ahead.

Super fun weekend, great to be part of such a fantastic club.

Middle Distance preparation training for the SM this weekend. Elise set two loops on Lunsen. This is the map that everyone raves about, it's so great and so challenging and so I was quite excited to go out and try my luck. Well, even knowing that it would be hard, and going slowly so as to be able to read all the features, I struggled mightily. Very subtle hills, and things were much too wet for me to discern swamps in the midst of just damp open woods. Not too bad considering the many opportunities to make mistakes that I avoided :) But I was still bouncing around on the map, hitting features that I didn't really mean to go past. I finished the first loop and started the second with a girl from the club, Kajsa, who offered to let me go first because I would be faster than her :) I did finally catch up to her again going to the last control and outsprinted her to the finish.

I guess I am open to loving Lunsen as much as everyone else does, but it's going to take a few more trips (preferably with better weather) and some better navigation before I can convert fully. Pawtuckaway is still my favorite, is what I'm saying :)

C • Lunsen 2

Two loops of the testbanan with a small contingent at a relaxed pace. The weather was quite blah, and I think that contributed to the decreased numbers. The first loop we all ran together as a big group and the second loop the same, except there were fewer people. Chatted a bunch ( in English) as we ran and I think that I finally know where the course goes!

A rest day of sorts. I managed to blow out a tire on my bike (not paying enough attention and inflated the tube to about 80 PSI when it wanted 45 PSI) so I decided to spend some time and change the tube and the tire. So first I bought the necessary replacements, and then I realized that I don't have any of the right tools. Well, a couple of bent spoons later and after several hours had passed I had managed to change my tire and adjust Sam's bike's gear shifting cable, but then it was a bit too late to go out and run. Probably a wise idea as I still have the little cold that I manged to pick up over the weekend.

The public race at the SM long finals:

A middle distance style and length course, in wet rainy weather. I woke up with a bit of a cold and I felt a little stuffy and just generally fuzzy as I went out on this course. I didn't have any trouble per se with the beginning part of the course, but I was going pretty slowly and not really anticipating features... more just reacting to them.

At control 5, Linus caught me from 3 minutes back and I used that as an incentive to push a little harder. I ran harder on the way to six but was a bit uncertain in the circle because of it. Then on the next one I decided that Linus and another runner were cutting in too early and consequently ran right past the control.

I had a nice streak of running for the next few but not always keeping on course, and it wasn't until the final 5 controls ( all quite easy) that I got a good rhythm and speed going.

Winsplits for the event here. I came in 73 out of 101.

Then cheering during the finals of the SM long. I am the loudest cheerer in Sweden, I think.

C • The loudest cheerer in Sweden 3

The Alex Edit:

SM long qualifier race. A beautiful day for running which means a kind of gross day for just standing around. There were 4 heats of men, and I was in the first heat with 43 starters. I knew that I didn't have a chance of making the final (top ten in each heat) but I wanted to have a good race to be able to compare myself with the best. I started out quite well, staying in good contact on the longish leg, and having no trouble at all finding the flag. This set the tone for the whole race.

On 10, the long leg, I waffled a bit before choosing to go more or less straight. Which worked out fine except for all the slogging through the thick green, I lost time to other runners so either I need to learn how to attack the green a bit better or I need to avoid it. I executed pretty well, up until the last descent along the spur. I got off on the parallel ridge and stopped on the wrong set of cliffs, but corrected pretty quickly.

With the end of the race in sight, I committed a cardinal sin ( at least according to Boris) and forgot to orienteer all the way to the end of the course.17 started out well, I was running behind a pack of runners heading for the field and I noticed that I had drifted a bit right of where I was planning on going, but I was pushing hard with the crew, so I didn't correct my line. Instead, I spiked the other control in the reentrant that wasn't mine, and according to Lisa ( who I was right behind at the time) I looked like an älg in the headlights, stopping short and trying to figure out my mistake. I looked around for my hilltop and spur, but didn't see them but eventually I just headed farther left because I knew that I had drifted too far right. Then I saw the spur and cliff. 18 was the last control in the field corner and that was it.

I finished 33rd in my heat and am pretty pleased all told. Tomorrow I will run the open race and then cheer on the 6 Linné runners that made it through to the finals. In my heat both Rassmus (in 4th) and Loefaas (in 9th). Also Mats, and Oskar-- and for the women -- Rasa and Inga.

C • Nice 6

I knew that we would be spending the whole day driving so I wanted to get some training in early before work. So I headed over to run backbanan and after getting a little lost I made it to the start. I wore my X-talons- which are falling apart - and set out at a hard pace but pretty conservatively too, because I wanted to have enough left to push the 2nd half. I came through the middle in 13:20 and felt great the whole way. I finally did the whole thing without getting lost!

Maybe next time I can beat Boris's fastest.

Janne's backbana in Uppsala - Splits

Running over to the clubhouse, stopping at my favorite tree to load up on apples. When you are taking apples from someone else's tree it is called pallaning ( I might be spelling that wrong) but apparently it's borderline okay if the branch hangs over the fence.

C • Palla äpplen... 1

Quite a long jog from the parking to the start triangle.

A really fun training on Hagby, starting out with Erik, Sam, and Kristina, and then promptly getting confused by the scale and vegetation and thus running well past the first control. Ah well, I turned around and got back into the swing of things, but an embarrassing way to start. On two I was on the right feature, but needed to check my descriptions in order to figure out which side of the hill the control was hung on. Overran 4, but 5-8 were quite clean. I wasn't running too fast because I was anxious about rolling over on my left ankle after the two times I rolled it on Sunday. I found Boris and Kristina at the end of the first loop, and then we set out for 9. I swung way too far right, and then got confused about where I should be expecting to find the reentrant, crossing the area too many times in the process. Boris was waiting at 10, to convince me that it was too dark to safely orienteer and so Kristina, Boris and I jogged back to the cars, stopping by control 15, which was a challenging crepuscular control.

So, I had a half-hatched plan to go run the testbanan and actually learn where it goes, but then I stayed too long at work. The work day schedule was a bit funny so the gels I poured in the morning were still waiting for me when I got back from the animal facility at 4pm... I didn't want to waste them so I loaded and ran the gels while I practiced some Swedish on Quizlet (which, incidentally, is a really neat site). So I took the photos, and then printed them out, but the printouts were oddly missing some of the lanes on my gel. I had to go, and wait for the computer to be free again to discover that the default setting on from the gel computer is to crop all the photos to fit the page better... Not so good when I have already cropped each photo.

Anyway, I got home and collected a Boris and we went out for a nice jog around the neighborhood, saw some beasts, and came home in time for an excellent dinner with friends!

And speaking of quizlet, here is one that Boris made for me. Orienteering !

C • The only one I didn't know ... 1

Quick transition between work and home, and then jogging with Sam over to the clubhouse for Tuesday intervals.

C • :D 16

Warmup with about half the group, as there were two rival sets of intervals tonight. One set was doing woods intervals and the other group was doing trail intervals. Even split in half, our group had 23 people. The warmup was followed by a few drills, which seem to be the same everywhere, some ankle exercises, some high knees, butt kicks, pawing, and then one really new one that looked and felt like a Monty Python visit to the ministry of silly walks. I'm starting to meet and know people now, and the semester just started so there are other new people too. Including an Australian that is just orienteering with the club as cross training for kite boarding.

The workout was 6 x 2 mins (1 min rest) then 6 x 1 min (1 min rest) and finally 6 x 0.5 min (0.5 min rest) and the course was just loops around the Norbyskogan trails. A nice mix of up and down and flat, and also quite a lot of little kids doing their own training. The lead pack was Jan, Rasmus, and two or three guys I don't yet know, and for the first couple of intervals I was near the end of the pack, but then most of the guys slowed way down and I was running closer to the front. We actually stopped after each interval, with maybe a little jogging in a circle, before setting out on the next one. On our fifth 30 second piece we decided to stop at the top of the hill instead of at 30 seconds, which was the right attitude I think :)

When we were all done, we turned around and ran backward looking for the ladies, and then cooled down running as one big group again. I chatted with Simon, who is visiting from Denmark, and is studying organic farming methods and how to get phosphates back into the soil in an organic way.

Back to Blodstensvägen ( I'm getting pretty good at switching the keyboard to swedish letters) jogging with Sam and Lisa. Excellent day.

Staffet DM

DM middle

C • I'm pretty jealous of your ... 5

C • Apparently Samantha is fall... 3