Training Log Archive: Rosstopher

Turned the Garmin on late, so this is part of the jog from home over to the library where we were meeting Arianna to start the sprint. Warm and overdressed. Headlamp battery should be fully charged but super dim. Not a problem for tonight's training but Nåsten winter trainings will need something brighter.

Tricky night sprint (without control flags) in the older part of the city. Started two minutes behind Boris, but didn't catch any time. Was feeling a pretty good flow and think that I made good choices and planned ahead successfully. Near the end had a couple of regrettable hesitations and mistakes (running from 11 to 12, I accidentally passed by 2) but the overall feeling of the course was one of being re-energized.

After the training we headed over to Arianna's for Halloween themed pumpkin risotto and board games. A very good day ^Tm.

Back from the sprint to shower and pick up Sam and our bikes.

Running Smålandskavlen on the Linné 2nd team. Feeling a little bit of pressure to perform well, as the rest of the team was pretty good. Certainly feeling a touch like the weak link, but mostly just happy to have a chance to run.

On Saturday night, David and Josef had pretty decent runs and that put our team about 13 minutes behind and in 31st place. I had woefully forgotten the vuvuzela at home this weekend, and I was relegated to just shouting real loud as a cheering section of one. Boris went out looking hardcore and I started to warm up and get ready for my own course.

Boris had a good run, made up a bunch of places, and (After some fumbling in the changeover zone) I set out in 25th spot. I felt great, and the first couple of controls had me feeling pretty confident and strong. I was moving well through the forest and not letting the many people around distract me.

I had a few minor bobbles in the first section but my first big mistake came on my way to 11, where I chose a very cautious route to the control that had some extra climb, some thick forests, one regrettable electric fence, and lost me about 2 or 3 minutes. I botched the next by not reading my control descriptions properly and navigating to the wrong boulder, and another bobble a couple controls later where I didn't notice the cliff I was looking for but knew I was in the right area so stood there confused for a bit until I turned around.

I guess these were all indications that I had gotten a little tired, and a tired Ross makes more mistakes than a fresh Ross. I passed off to Olle in 40th position, and felt like a good run for me would have been about 75. (Robbie ran his leg 4 in 69, which would have needed a great run from me).

Very happy with the first 10 controls and it would have been nice to get a chance to redo the 11-15 set :)

Olle had a good course, having the longer forking and running his 13 k course faster than my 10 k course. He almost caught the Umeå team (who were friendly rivals) and that put us in 42nd.

Linné 1 for the men was 3rd, Sam anchored the Linné 1 women to 10th. Another awesome weekend of racing, good weather, and team bonding.

Hurray for Boris feeling cautiously optimistic about his ankle. We had a long travel day, so we decided to go for a morningjog. Boris had the helm, and unsurprisingly we ended up by the hairy cows. At about 20 minutes, Boris switched over to doing some running drills on the bike path and I picked up speed a little and started a little tour of the Stadskoggen and Norby.

As per usual, the relaxed tone of the morning turned frantic when we needed to scarf down some lunch and make it to the clubhouse in time to load the mini-busses.

A long week, and not much motivation to go train. A quiet evening to play games at home seemed like a prudent choice. Rest day!

Biking in Uppsala

Warmup consisting of running to the clubhouse and then some on the trails in Norby,

Intervals tonight were {5 x 2 minutes on, 1 rest} x 2 with 4 minutes rest between sets.

Feeling quite good during the training, and keeping up with the leaders fairly well. Only 20 minutes of interval time tonight, which I was pretty happy with, as a longer workout would have been daunting.

I really like how when we finish an interval at the top of a slope, in the rest period we jog back to the bottom to start the next one with another climb. I think that is definitely the right attitude when it comes to workouts.

Boris and I had a plan for something gentle, and a time limit of at most 1 hour since we were heading down to the Uppsala Short Film Festival at the end.

I looked at a map and suggested going south, so as to run through a wooded area I haven't visited yet, and so our run took us on a pleasant track thataway. I was feeling super frisky and chatty, Boris was crashing after his Coke sugar high faded.

After we got home, Sam got grumpy because she made us dinner and we didn't have time to eat it before heading out the door.

Movies were good though, and it's nice to have a social life that involves some culture-y bits :)

Night orienteering on a tough map, on a foggy night, and a warning that some people had made big mistakes (30 minute mistake) while running the course during the day! Yikes.

There was a surprise start order, and we had about 15 seconds to prepare before getting sent out on the course. I got sent out at the same time as Olle on the long course, but since there was forking, and I was slow along the first hill, I didn't see much of him. Footing was treacherous, but I was going okay until about a quarter of the way through the long leg to 2. I got turned around on a sketchy trail (map needed some updating, we had been warned) and then managed to drift way off the map and proceeded to take the next 20 or so minutes to finally hack my way out to the road where I discovered that I was much farther north than I had intended. The troubles did not stop there, as I still had difficulty with the flag and was now thinking that I would need to lop off a section of the course so as to not have people waiting around for me. Another big error on 4 sealed the deal, but the sudden dimming of the headlamp was what really got me to head for home. I didn't have my backup with me, and it was a long way, through awfully junky forest, back to civilization.

A cautious approach to getting home was attempted, but that just meant that I tried to get out to the trail as soon as possible so that if my light died I would at least be able to work my way home. Since the trail had already proved elusive once, I was not sure I would be able to rely strictly on that plan. In the end I just aimed for and hit the fields and then road with enough battery life to get me back to base.

Pretty poor showing, with only four controls visited and none of them spiked, but an adventure on a wicked hard map, so I might chalk it up in the win category anyway.

Got a little behind schedule and so didn't get started on my plan for two loops of the backbana until just before 5 tonight. There was an entry in the training bank for the morning, suggesting 2 loops of the course but the meeting time was during working hours, but I decided that I would do the same workout, just on my own.

Conditions were not ideal, wet leaves, some fresh downed trees, and getting dark near the end. So this time was all that I had in me for today. Not too slow in the start, coming through the half in 12:34, then got a little tired and slightly lost on the last woods climb (hard to see the goat path in these conditions), so through one loop in 27:12. (no garmin tonight, this was on my timex)

Slipping a lot down the hills for the next loop (most of the dobbs on these shoes have pretty much rusted/fallen out. Bought them in June or July I think) half way on this lap was 14:01, and really finishing in the dark second lap was 30:32.

Not a bad effort. Will have to come out and run a few more doubles/triples/(quads??) at somepoint :)

Janne's backbana in Uppsala - Splits

A good race at a nearby map on a beautiful day. The same map, Skogstibble, as the DM relay (on Sept 4th). Today I raced much better, and am very happy with my result. I look forward to a few months from now, when this level of racing will seem inexcusably poor :)

I was named to the 2nd Linné team for next weekend, and so I decided that, in preparation, I wanted to focus more on being aggressive in the forest and running hard. This worked pretty well, with only a few small bobbles throughout the course. It's getting easier to move through the terrain here and to read the map :)

Also, thanks to Boris for encouraging me to tape my ankles today.

Quickroute here.
Winsplits here.

C • Next weekend 2

C • Ha 8

Orienteering today felt like some kind of cosmic reward. "Good job, you get to go out with your friends on a beautiful day and run through the woods. Keep up the good work."

Eight of us headed down to a new map for me, Kungsham-Morga. People here are spoiled, and there was a lot of grumbling about how moose hunting season meant that we couldn't go to the nice map for training. It was kind of nice to have real hills to run up, but the green was thick in places.

The plan was to run with Boris and Andrew, and at first I was champing at the bit, pulling ahead and enjoying the sensation of running fast and controlled through the woods. Then I would wait for them to catch before we would head to the next. I settled down after about 7 and was running at more the group speed. A very fun session marred only by a crazy amount of cattle-tracked mud wallowing and, unrelated to the mud, turning my ankle twice or three times ( I wonder if this is an effect of wearing integrators, or an effect of switching to a different shoe from the ones I've been wearing for the past couple of months). On the last ankle sprain I swore loudly at the pain, and a dog-walker on the nearby trail was possibly convinced that I was swearing at her dog, she was amused I think.

After training, lunch and games. I lost Ticket to Ride Europe for the first time, the end of a glorious winning streak spanning nearly a week.

C • Ticket to ride! 1

Event: US S/M/L Champs 2011 & WRE
 

To the clubhouse. Headlamp not charged, wonder what happened there.

The club intervals this week were (1 loop slow then 1 loop fast) x 3-5 on the Norby trails. Mostly on the lighted trails, but the headlamp was nice for the sections in the dark. The loop was about 1 k long and a nice rolling section of trail. Legs feeling strong but not fast, and I felt like I had one speed available to me tonight. For the fast laps I was getting 3:50 - 4:05. Had decided that I would do 4 sets and was just slowly jogging and chatting one more loop with the crew after I finished, but then Sam and Kristina appeared and headed out to do one last fast one. Not to be outdone, Boris and I set off in pursuit. I am glad that I did all five, as I was feeling really tired at the start and was having a mental battle over whether I could/should do more than 3 sets. It feels good to triumph over mental enervation.

Back from intervals.

Half-Marathon. A re-run of the same course as our first half-marathon this season. It was tough choosing between this training and the night-o training in Nåsten, but I wanted to keep the weekly habit and I thought it would be a bit quicker (and thus I'd be home to see Sam faster). Glad I did it.

The group of 8 paced quite reasonably from the start, picking up as we hit 10k and as people started dropping off. I managed to keep up with Henrik and Olle until about 16, but they were pulling away. I gave a little surge to catch back up to them at 18 or so, but had no ability to maintain that level, so they again pulled ahead. Stuck waiting for traffic as we entered the city again, and then couldn't follow their lead anymore, so I got a bit lost and added a few meters getting back up to the castle. They were nice and waited for me there :)

Night O training course at Stenhagen. Went passably well, except for one truly poor control. Area was a bit thicker and wetter than I expected and I didn't have enough confidence to push on through to the control site. Instead stopped and relocated several times, and kept missing.

Our weekend raid to Norway went very well. We hung out with Cristina and Melissa and raced a very tough Blodslitet as well. I finished in just over 4 hours, which was much slower than I had anticipated (aiming for 3:30) but I can find lots of positives from my performance to go along with the many and varied mistakes :).

Also, for your reading pleasure, Blog Post.

So not a great day for timeliness, but what else is new. After work I biked into the city to pick up a birthday present for Seabass and then found the Chinese grocery that my officemate suggested so I could buy Chinese five spice powder (and more hoisin, because Sam is addicted). Of course, by the time I had finished that, I was super late getting back to the apartment to grab the headlamp and oshoes and head out the door.

Crossed paths with the club as they were warming up towards the Stadskogen and I was biking frenetically to the clubhouse to get my map.

Tonight was two loops around, with a jumble of reflective controls to start each loop before joining up with the reflective terrain loops in the woods. The reflective course is awesome, Johan has nailed shinys every 5 or 10 meters along a fun course off trail in the woods. You can see it with a headlamp at night, but not during the day. I ran this pair of loops.

My orienteering was a bit hesitant, and I had trouble following the reflexbana in some places, but I did come across a fox (en rav) in the swamps near the south end of the course, so that more than made up for the feeling of slow navigation.

C • a fox in the swamps 2

I am too lazy to go get my Garmin and download it, but tonight was a trainingsbank session of intervals. 17 people showed up, so it felt like the whole club, almost. The session ended up being 9,6,3,3,3,2,2,1,1,1,1,30",30",30",30" with 2 mins after the first two intervals and then 1 after all the others. The lighted loop in the Stadskogen is great, but it's not really all that bright :)

Felt pretty good, and was able to keep up fairly well tonight. The boys group ended with just Olle, Henrik, Fredrick, Johan and me doing the shorter intervals. Johan suggested that we take turns being a rabbit for the 30 second pieces, where the goal was just to run all out and stay ahead of the group. That was a fun way to end the session, though I cheated a little bit by giving myself a 2 second headstart :)

Dropped my chain again last night, so this was me running into work. Any hints on how to keep a tight chain on a single gear, no derailleur bike? I've managed to fix it enough to bike on, but it still seems to catch oddly on each pedal and I'm worried that it'll just pop off again next time I'm late for something and biking in a hurry.

Nice morning, I love the trails on the way to work.

C • chain tension repairs 2

After work, went to fix my bike. Then Olle, and Mari biked past at the same time, and a few moments later, Gustav came walking along too. This really is a small town.

Whole club half marathon training, as it is moose hunting season, and so we're staying out of the woods as much as possible. Started out at a pretty good clip, heading into new uncharted territory for me again to the southeast. Running and chatting but then fell off the back of the leaders and it was just Olle and me for a ways. Olle is a great running partner.

At about 9k we swung back past the clubhouse and Anders caught up and Frederick picked it up to run with us too. Our pack of 4 headed back towards the science park before we said goodnight to Frederick and made a loop down by the river.

Olle looked at the watch and realized that we needed to pick up the pace if we were going to beat our time from last week. So as we headed up the hill again into the last 5 k, we picked up the pace from about 4:20s to about 3:50s and had a really strong finish. Felt great to push hard.

After training, Boris and I went into town to watch the football game, Sweden vs Holland, with Janne, Thomas, and Frida.

Training on a short time schedule. I stayed at work too long and had plans to grab a beer with Gustav at 8.

Boris suggested heading out with one of the Tuesday night courses ( in this case A2) for some night orienteering/running. We ran over to the clubhouse to grab some maps and then headed out, trails at first but then a line o with some tough navigation and also some thickish green sections.

It was great fun, though I was depending a lot on Boris for his lamp which was better charged, and his brain, which was also apparently better charged.

Running late so cut it massively short, but really happy to get out and get a taste of what winter training will be like!

Middle Distance race in the same venue as 25-manna. I was feeling quite out of it at the start of the race, and was not orienteering crisply or quickly at all. Still managed to enjoy myself though. Not sure why I lacked the spark today, but wasn't too good or too bad on any of the legs. I ended up a few minutes back on all of the people I was comparing myself with, Ulrik, Boris, Andrew. Robbie put a nice run together and ran much faster than I was going. Johan also had a great time, coming in 2nd on the H21-3 course.

Throat is a little sore from cheering, but today was a very cool day to be wearing Linné colors. 25-manna relay is a real zoo, but we had good teams leaders helping us get through it (Thanks Elin) and there was good weather too.

I was running leg 5 for the 3rd team, which means that I was waiting for the last of the leg 4 runners to come through the changeover and hand me a map. For our 3rd and 4th team, all the runners were coming back almost at the same time, so there was a whole gaggle of red and blue heading for the start triangle together.

I was running pretty well today, the terrain was open and runnable and there were paths into and out of most of the controls, which meant that it was a fast day for orienteering. Actually it could be quite frustrating to be running through the woods and get stuck in line behind a bunch of slower runners heading through a swamp. I swung too far wide on my short leg to 2, and hesitated a little heading into 6, but always felt in control. My biggest error was one of decision making, when I thought it would be okay to cross a small river - and not at the marked crossing points. I sunk into mud up to my waist and got my leg tangled in a submerged branch.... the only way to extract myself was to flop forward and grab ahold of the far bank and pull myself through the muck. I lost some time there, plus my map was temporarily unreadable as everytime I tried to wipe the mud off, I just made things dirtier. I ran up the wrong hill as I contemplated ( but ultimately rejected) the idea of licking a spot of the map clean, but quickly sorted that mistake out and the rest of the course was really only a glorified finish chute.

Passed off to a club member that I had never met before (and still don't know yet) and got to spend the rest of the day cheering and chatting.

Our first team came in 5th!, second team 35th (I think, results are still a bit dodgy) and Sam had an awesome closing leg. They were the fastest of the Club-2nd teams. And then Boris and Karin had good runs at the end of our relay too, and we ended up as the best of the Club-3rd teams.

Tomorrow we go back to the same terrain for a short race, and in the evening it's a big pizza party!

C • Stuck 4

Wander.Lost

C • you look kinda tired 4

With my bike locked up across town, I made my morning commute to work in jogging mode today. It's a short run, but a great way to start the day.

A really productive day at work, feeling very pleased. A short jog to retrieve my bike, and adjust the rear wheel so that the chain was tighter.

A good day a work, but then disaster struck as I left the lab, heading on my bike down to Lunsen. Somehow, while swerving to avoid a cyclist trying to turn right into me, I shifted the spacing on my fixed chain bike, and then spent the next 30 minutes dealing with a chain that kept slipping off the gears. I didn't have any tools with me, and it was too long to walk my bike all the way to the map, so I locked my bike to a post and ran with my bag the few remaining K - in the rain - to see how the training was going.

Hannah set a really run czech relay training, and I will happily go down and run the course sometime later.

An inadvertent rest day, but probably being a little rested before 25-manna this weekend is a good thing.

This week's half marathon took us more west (rather, east) of the city than I had ever gone before, which was pretty cool. I had timed things wrong at work so I left the lab in a rush, in the process leaving my access card and my Garmin in my office. So I can't upload my track and I also can't see the screen because I took out my contacts and my glasses are with everything else. So excuse any typos :)

A group of 8 tonight, which I guess means it's gaining in popularity. We all started out together, running at about 4:10 pace, then speeding up. Oskar split off at about 6k, and Olle, Mandus and I took a "short cut" (read: Ross was confused about which way to go) which was fine because Rassmus, David, Mats and Henrik were speeding up to a pace that was faster than we could go. Mandus split off next and then it was Olle and me running and chatting about the neighborhoods we were passing and the upcoming weekend.

I again led us off the route (adding an extra half k in the process) but Olle was able to once again get us back on track. We faded a little after about 16k, but still pushed really hard up the hill to finish strong in the castle.

Great to have company and legs felt much better than last week. A winter of this and I'll be going places...

C • I think you lost your direc... 3

Warming up with the club before intervals. Jogging and going drills in the stadskogen. A pretty big crowd tonight.

It gets dark so early. Intervals tonight were 4x (3,1 rest, 2,1 rest,1, 2 rest). Legs more lively than last week, but still working hard to keep up. Intervals on a track are much much easier because you don't have to work as hard mentally. On a dark dirt track with rolling hills, you need to push yourself and pick out foot placements. I think these types of workouts will make me a much better runner.

Snuck in a quick trip around the backbanan tonight. I biked over and quickly put on my shoes ( quickly because the mosquitoes are out in the evening) and decided that I would really like to break 26 minutes tonight. Set out fairly quickly and almost immediately started slipping out on the downhills, but kept a pretty good effort and avoided any falls.

Came through the halfway point at 12:12 and felt pretty strong. Only started fading on the killer hill (the pebbley one). I peeked at my watch going into the last hill, and saw that I was going to be a little too slow to make it. I focused on short steps and made myself keep pushing. Was immensely surprised and gratified to come through just under. Beating Boris's time was one of my intermediate goals... now I need to keep chipping away at 25:27 which is place 20 on the top 20 right now.

Garmin was nestled in my backpack in the lab, so there is no way to watch how slow I was crawling up that last set of hills.

C • backbanan 2

C • I have to ask.... 7

Janne's backbana in Uppsala - Splits