Training Log Archive: W

WOC Sprint Day in Forres! Frankly, this was not my highest priority race at this year's WOC. But, it IS a race, and I ALWAYS want to run sprint finals. I've had a taste for it once, and I ALWAYS want to be back. And I HATED not to be.

I think my training up to this point has been okay, not great, having struggled with motivation, probably just brought on by overall loneliness. I don't think I'm any worse than I have been in past years, perhaps even better, but the problem is that sprinters are getting SO much better. When I qualified in France I was 1:15 back, and had 15 seconds to spare. Nowadays qualifying is much, much tighter, in the 45 second range, which is also not being helped my marginally easy and very short courses. I really don't understand the problem with putting on two real sprints. Why does one have to be longer and more difficult than the other?

Anyway, the race itself wasn't so bad for me, but I made crucial mistakes along the way. The first was from 3 to 4 when I turned a corner and slipped and fully scraped a large amount of skin off my right shin & knee, as well as slicing my right palm and the back of my right hand. It didn't hurt so much as just has that effect of making your mind start buzzing (and covering the map in blood). So, on my way to 4 I went down the wrong sidewalk and had to turn back.

On my way towards the control before the long leg, I also couldn't really see the route choice alternatives, and since I saw Leandersson (way in the distance), taking the left route, that's what I took, but really didn't feel fast while running the straight shot. I generally figured out the rest of the course, as far as the leg to the arena, where for some reason I stupidly decided to turn back and go to the west rather than go straight and to the east. I suppose I couldn't determine whether there was a way to cut across the school yard and thought I had to go all the way to the road, which would have made my route better. I then also missed the gap between the houses. I thought it was a trap because the north line went straight through where the gap was. Dumb, loss of 10 seconds or so.

Not unlike Venice, I feel like with my small mistakes, I ran myself out of narrowly qualifying for the final. In my shape and age it seems the only way I'll get to finals again is if I can have a perfectly flawless race. This is, essentially what I did in Finland, save for the whole "punch the wrong control thing".

Regardless, this still hurt, a lot (and so did my hands and shin, exacerbated by the fact that there was no First Aid people anywhere). As I had written before, what bothered me the most is that the possibility of ever making a final again feels like its slipping further and further away every year.

That thought is horrifying.

Headed over to Nairn for a very [very] light jog around the sprint model, which included vaulting fencing, jumping over weird haybale fences, running one section of the housing estate fast, and then going over to explore the dunes area that was supposed to be featured in the relay. I'm afraid of dunes, after the NZ World Cup debacle. That was so, so tough, and the mere thought of sprinting through them is terrifying. These are not nearly as extensive as those in NZ, but still, afeared. I remember there being so many depressions, and it was impossible to find the particular one you needed, and of course you couldn't see any controls because they were either in the depression or concealed by long grass. That sprint relay could be tough.

Nearby training on a fell-y area to get a feel for how the open bits are. They're fairly easy, but tough to run through, because they're so lumpy and soft. Rock features can also be tough to find and distinguish. Then, on the lower slopes, the bracken is once again hard to run through. Its not so much the height that concerns me as the blissful running through it until you smash into an unseen rock.

That, I'm concerned about.

We're down to one training a day, which I'm not... entirely a fan of, but, whatever, its okay. We did a mini-prologue/pursuit race on two maps near our accommodation. Upon reflection, these were actually pretty relevant. The first run was through some grassy, small hill terrain which had lots and lots of chest-high bracken. On me. That's high bracken. It was tough to stay on compass in this sort of terrain, too, between the bracken and some thicker shrubbery that one had a tendency to try to go around rather than straight through. Once again, these maps had questionable vegetation mapping, so quite a few times I intended to go straight only to run into some impenetrable green. The contours are still the way to go, but are subtle and tricky to read sometimes, especially at high speed. Fortunately, I don't need to worry about that too much since I'm not running the middle anyway. 1:15 for pour moi!

Well, that was not a great start. And even on a map I've been on before! Loch Vaa, mostly open heather with weird contours. Raphael had us do a far too difficult multi-technique training and I think we all made fully hopeless mistakes. I'm not sure I correctly found number one. The big problem was that the vegetation was totally inaccurate, which shouldn't be a problem, since you can follow the contours, but that was also tough. There was also claims that the scale was totally off, which would make a certain amount sense since I undershot basically every control.

A high speed-ish race simulation on the British selection race course in Elgin. I didn't feel very fast, and I also made a dumb mistake on one particular control. I did some speed work before coming to Scotland, but I'm just not sure I did enough of it, because I just didn't really feel like I had the jump, pop, skip, etc., that I need to do well at sprinting.

Fun sprinting though. There's always that. Though it wasn't all that difficult.

Full break day. Fully.

Travel day from Sweden to Scotland! Although a long day of taxis and planes and buses, I really wanted to do a little shakeout road run with a little sprint training in Edinburgh. Unfortunately the control picking exercise didn't get printed, but I did one of the sprints around downtown Edinburgh and it was really fun. Quite difficult and I needed liberal use of my magnifier to identify where I could get through and where I couldn't. Tried to focus on the things I learned from the Elite Sprint at O-Ringen and they were put to good use here when running along a straight road and trying to figure out which turn I needed.

Although I wasn't running super fast the focus was mostly still there and given the technical difficultly I'm not even sure how much faster I could have run and not made big mistakes!

O-Ringen Day 5 (or 6). The chase day! Last time I was in O-Ringen I was in the chase start of the elite category as well - 89:30 behind. Yes, I made the chase start, by 30 seconds. This time was about half that gap after 5 days, which was a bit of an improvement! I had a couple people starting just ahead of me, including a club mate, and a couple just behind. So, by the long leg of #4, we had grouped up a little and had a train of 5 going until another long leg to 8 and we broke up into a group 3. The fellow from Belgium was definitely at the front driving the group, and he was doing a great job with navigation. He was nailing the control locations and was quite fit but I was able to hang with him because I'd sometimes take slightly more efficient route choice and end up right on his tail again without having to expend much effort.

Unfortunately, at 17, I thought he was going up the wrong re-entrant (which he wasn't) and I lost his back, and then lost the other guy after hurrying and making a mistake on the next control. Now by myself, my control taking pace decreased quite significantly and I actually managed to lose 4 minutes to them in the last 20 minutes of the race, doh. I think the losses were compounded by coming into an area of downhill and sidehill controls which always make me anxious because I have trouble with them and wanted to keep errors to a minimum. Still, I went too high on one control, and then picked up a tail myself who contributed absolutely nothing to our joint efforts to find the last few controls. There was no way I was going to let him past on the long straight run over the last two controls,

Super fun to run into the stadium and polish off 6 stages of O-Ringen, which I would assume really doesn't happen very happen, or ever. I only know of two other people who did it this year.

A little disappointed with how my speed dropped off once I lost the group, though, if I could have hung on I was in for a certain top 10 place, since I would have gone sub-100 minutes. Still, top 20 is satisfactory for the sixth race in sixth days and it was a great lesson in running with a group and a speed higher than I probably would have otherwise achieved alone. I lead the group sometimes myself which was also great practice.

After six long days I'm also pleased at how my legs feel pretty okay and that my navigation and focus is still progressively getting better. Had quite a few irrelevant thoughts today but perhaps being in the group meant I had more opportunities to drift off into space because I had not a lot to think about while other people were doing the navigation.

I'm pretty sure that's not a good thing.

Day 3 (or 4) of O-Ringen. If there was any race I was going to skip, it might have been this one. I had been resolved that if it was pouring heavily, I'd not do it. Unfortunately, it was a super nice day and so I couldn't possibly. Then I thought, "well, I'll just do some of the course". But then I saw the long leg and wanted to try to go straight and at that point I was at the furthest part of the course and there was really no sense to not do the rest of the course and 96 minutes later I did the whole thing.

Oops.

I wouldn't say I was blasting at all points of the race, but I was going fast enough to try to tax my orienteering skills and force me to continue to pay attention. Made a bit of a mistake on three with another green rock, and it was entirely a product of more poor compass work. I knew I just needed to stay rock solid with my compass while going through the green, but... didn't.

Near the end of the course, there was also a couple super vague controls in some green, which although had plenty of elephant tracks, was still kind of scary and I took it pretty slow and cautiously. Nice day, nice orienteering, I'm glad I did it, though my intense fear of getting sick is getting worse and worse.

O-Ringen Day 4 (or 5). The middle distance day. I was also very much on the fence about this race, since I have no interest in the WOC middle (now, at least), but, yet again, it wasn't raining, so I was cool with toughing it out, and it was almost certainly worth it! Really nice forest, with little round hills. Not a lot of it was remarkably difficult, but a few legs the forest thickened up quite a bit and you had to cross some marshes in the hopes of hitting the intended round hill on the other side.

Ultimately that's how I lost most of my time; seeing some super scary legs and practically walking to them to keep my time loss to a minimum. On some legs, in retrospect, the actual location of the control was pretty easy, it was just everything in between was really difficult. It was a little bit too much paranoia and fear, especially on one leg where it was across a hill ridge with tons of rocks and features, but ultimately the final feature was an extremely clear round hill at the far end of the ridge. So, who cares about the stuff in the middle?

In general, it was a mistake free race, but just not very fast. I suppose its just another building block in trying to find that level of speed and precision that is optimal for me. My threshold. I guess we could call this a "push" day, rather than a "pull" day.

In the context of aerobic thresholds, pull days are great. In orienteering technique... a little risky.

Rest day at O-Ringen! And by rest day, I mean sprint day! Last time I was at O-Ringen, I got to do the elite sprint (being in the elite category), and it was super fun.

The first half was mega technical, and made very difficult by two turns before the start triangle. For some reason, that always makes things quite tough. You immediately get quite turned around and everything gets a little bit panicky. I managed to recover and hit the first 3 pretty well before number 4 which was a longer leg and had many, many traps in it. I navigated the really tough part well but then turned a turn too early at one point into a dead end. It was only 4-5 steps but enough to probably lose 10 seconds. Too bad.

There were more tricky legs that involved a few map stops and some liberal magnifier use to be able to see if I could get through certain gaps. Number 8 in particular was difficult just to figure out how to get into the mini-cage that the control was in. I often fail to realize that a great way to determine where to turn when running along a row of many passages is to use landmarks on the other side of the road. Here, I stopped a few times to try to count before realizing I just needed to turn when there was a cliff on the other side of the road. No problem.

The second part of the course was super easy and all a running race. Two days of long distances took its toll on my legs a little, and although I don't think I was going my absolute, "try to qualify for WOC final", hard pace, I was running pretty quick and staying focused on having perfect exit directions or even spotting the controls ahead of going towards them. So, no hesitations, just smooth and powerful running. Not relaxed running, though. Could definitely been more relaxed.

I was still well behind the winners, but most of them hadn't already done two days of racing, and I would have placed 30th in the Elite class, which is a far cry from the 60-something I placed 5 years ago.

So.... improvement! And fun! And sprint relay at WOC!

Day 2 of O-Ringen. But, really, who cares anymore?Yeah, I still want to race well, but my pace is a bit lower and I'm just trying to do the right things and with strong focus. This stage was a little bit more of the same as Day 1 with spongy ground and runs across marshes, but also a little bit more climb and some really pleasant areas of white. And a whole bunch more road running. There was a long leg where the obvious route seemed to be going slightly right and on the road, which provided a whole ton of time to look at the whole course and plan where I'm totally going to blow it.

Okay, so I didn't quite plan that, but I did certainly blow it at 16. I haven't had a chance to plot in on QR, but I can tell that generally I was going straight, but coming over one of the hill sides I suspect I saw another re-entrant to my right and failed to check my compass and got sucked down that way and was now doing 90 degree parallel errors. This lead me to having no idea where I was and I found myself climbing the hill back to the road to relocate and continue.

A big time loss which marred an otherwise fairly good run, which is disappointing, but if I look at it "binarily", it was generally quite good with a large number of error-free controls. I unfortunately missed one obvious route choice during the middle of the course which I shouldn't have, which just means I need to make sure I invest an extra second when leaving the controls, especially if I haven't had time to plan.

O-Ringen, Day 1. This is the big one, the big one! The first long. For all the WOC marbles. The only one I really care about. I was nervous, but not as anxious as I was in Italy last year after a week of making horrible errors left and right. Sure, I did make horrible errors at KRV, but I felt like things were coming back together and getting a little better. Nevertheless, I was nervous, and really focused on going slow to number 1 to set the tone early, and staying as focused as I can throughout the race.

And there was definitely some nervous moments to 1. I went slightly too far left, and was in a reentrant, but I wasn't certain whether I went a little too far left or too far right. So, in a moment of panic, I guess, and went right. And... found the control. HALLELUJAH. I tried to immediately get any thoughts of "what if I went left?" out of my head and continue on, though it took me until after 2 to settle down again, where I got to run a little while on a path and have some time to plan and plan and plan some more.

Number 4 was another scary leg (at least, the last 1/4), so there was quite a few map stops and slow running to make sure I didn't head off course. Eventually I made it through the marsh and the thicker bit of forest to some white forest and a distinct re-entrant and was able to open it up again and go back to running.

I made my first bigger mistake at Bingo 7, which was a random rock on the side of a hill in some green forest. One of those rocks that you sort of couldn't see until you bumped into it. I thought I'd be able to see it while running along the bottom of the hill, or at least the wide shallow re-entrant it was on the side of, but.... nope. So, a little circle tour later, I eventually found it but lost probably a minute or slightly more.

Then there was a mega long leg which I executed only kind of well, and slowed down in the last third when I was extremely uncertain of where I am (since I went up the wrong re-entrant), but kept going on the bearing I had since I figured I would eventually see the rough open clearing prior to the control. And I did. And I sighed a sigh of relief. I also reminded a dude that he didn't punch at the water control, and he got all grumpy. No more helpful tips for Swedes from me!

Unfortunately as the race got longer and longer, I made some larger mistakes, one going to the hill above the small hill I was looking for, then getting hopelessly lost in the marsh of misery, where everyone was lost and there were controls everywhere. But, I relocated really quickly and kept time lost to a minimum. I then made a much bigger mistake on what should have been a quite easy control on a random rock in some green. It was a result of a bad bearing from a marsh before the control.

Bad bearings were, as usual, a recurring theme of the week.

But, then I did pretty well on a super scary flat marshy leg, created a little bit of a train, hooked one more control, flew around a small easy loop in white forest, botched the second to last control, and then hustled into the finish.

I did some mind math at the finish and concluded that the number of smaller mistakes I've done almost certainly wasn't good enough to win. I was so disappointed I thought I might cry. But, then it turned out that basically everyone in the entire race made those kind of mistakes. I was then so happy I thought I might cry.

Good day.

C • Well done! 1

Finally made it to O-Ringen! (And I mean that in an Attackblogging sense, though I suppose also in a literal sense)

Friday was a day off but we jogged over to a training map on Saturday to wander around and get a sense of what the happenings are in the woods of Bor[a with circle on it]s. The forest seems pretty runnable, plenty of squishy marshes that are physically difficult to run through but also easy to spot and navigate by. Lots of rocks underfoot which means my ankles will go back to being sliced up after having just recently healed from KRV. Oh well, who needs skin when I've got plenty of scar tissue?

Tomorrow starts O-Ringen, both logging and blogging, and I've got lots to say! So set your eyes to RIVETED.

Not really a race, per se, since we were all pretty knackered, but meant to be a full course that we could run and try to do everything right and put in a strong navigational effort. I ran with a 1:15000 map, which was really nice. Some parts of the forests are really really nice to run on, and the marshes are really, really tough to run in. Was kind of slow in the control circles (as if that's new) and made a few mistakes because of losing contact mid-way through the leg, but overall, despite the utter fatigue, my navigation was pretty well, especially given the level of detail at 1:15000. I haven't gotten to be on very many 1:15s in Finland at all, so this was great!

Morning relay training, which consisted of four different courses and mass starts with forking with the rest of the team. The first one was tough to get into the map since there seemed to be a lot detail, but the next three went much better as I was able to start recognizing the features vs. the map. There's lots of little micro-route choices here, since the visibility is good you can usually see where you want to go, its just difficult to figure out a way to get there effectively. Lots of little steep ups and downs can potentially make it better to go around rather than go straight, if it allows you to run quickly.

Was real tired by the end too when picking up some flags, and I suspect almost everyone stopped for a blueberry fuel break.

We're all pretty darn tired, so the afternoon workout was just a simple relocation exercise. Our partner would run into the box without us looking at the map and then we'd have to relocate to the control. It went pretty well for me, but I find it hard not to at least follow where I'm going in my head from my last known point to try and map out where I am. I can't imagine that's entirely the idea since during a race if I need to relocate I won't know that sort of thing.

Because I'm lost. If I know where I'd gone, I don't think I'd be lost....

Morning simplification training on a much nicer map than yesterday. Aimed to work on spotting the big round hills the controls were on and having good direction towards them. Quite easy control locations but it was good to stay mindful of focusing on the big features and seeing them from far away, especially useful on this 1:15 map.

Then a super huge rainstorm and thunderstorm came along and got everything real wet. I didn't know they had thunderstorms around here. I wish mid-Finland had more.

A little bit of compass work in the afternoon in another set of nice forest outside Stromstad. Unfortunately my compass is still kind of lacking, but getting better. As long as its getting better, I'm happy! I found again the difference on this map between the Kallio and the open land to be difficult to spot, and missed a control by going too high after not recognizing which is which. Plenty of rock faces that are not mapped as cliffs as well. Hence the importance of good compass, I suppose!

While I try to write up my previous posts from Kainuun Rasti Vikko, I thought at least I'd try to use this spotty internet to keep up to day on current sessions.

I spent all of yesterday travelling by train plane train car to Stromstad, Sweden, for a mini WOC 2016 camp with Team Canada Junior. After a mega-long day, we still had time to head out to one map for a bit of 1:15000 training. In general, I really quite like the tops of the hills in this terrain, quite open, pretty runnable, some Kallio, which is familiar, but I find the contours to be a little tricky and a lot more cliffs than the map seems to suggest. I don't agree with the map on that!

Unfortunately, though, the bottoms of hills are ugly and thick and ugly and apparently full of ticks.

Focusing these few days on keeping my focus on the simple things I have to do right. I wrote down plenty of things to think about from KRV and am slowly implementing them as I can. The mental focus was rock-bottom at KRV so any progress on that front will be positive.

Coach Kim provided me with a fast sharpening track workout to do before heading off to Sweden for the start of my month long O-dyssy. It involved 800 @ 2:34, 600 @ 1:42, 400 @ 62s, and 2 x 200 @ 32 seconds. He suggested it was going to be hard, and it was!

But, I managed to achieve those times pretty well, actually going 1:38 for 600 and running 31 and 28 for the 200s, so they were even a little too fast. Really short warm-up between the intervals, so the effort came fast and furious but was good stuff. I liked it.

Day 4 of KRV say much improved focus and some solid execution, but some simple mistakes lost me some time on another unacceptable large mistake.

This particular one all started off with leaving the control in a poor direction. That's it. I hurried a bit too much, and if I'd just compassed a little better in the correct direction I would have had no problems. Instead, I went off way right, realized it, was able to compensate with a new route choice, but then got confused by the cliffs along the side of the hill and stopped to soon and turned back, only to decided to bail to the road I had wanted to go to in the first place. All because my first 10 steps away from the control were poor.

Still, there was a long leg on a vague hillside that went pretty well. Sure, there was an elephant track for a lot of the way, but I was able to see important features on the way to continually remind me I was going in the right direction. That was positive, as were many other legs.

By the end of KRV I was doing many things right I wasn't doing at the beginning. I don't know why I became so braindead on day 1 and had to slowly work back to getting my head in the right place, but eventually it was back to normal-ish and hopefully maybe a little bit better thanks to all the lessons I learned along the way.

I'm trying not to label all the things I did poorly as things I need to improve, rather taking all the things I did and labelling them as "things to think about", and then writing down actionable items that will make myself better, rather than stop making thing worse.

Day 3 of KRV, a middle distance! While the elite folks get to do 15k on 1:15, we get to do 6k on 1:10. Whoopeeee.

At first, this race went really well, doing a lot of aggressive things, slowing down when necessary, running pretty hard, a little hook on 7, and then 8 came along.

I had to go down a hill, across a marsh, and then through a super vague flat section to find the end of a form line hill. The thing was, if I'd gone a little left, I could have jumped on a small ride and then had a better idea of when to go back into the woods and find the control. Instead, I decided to go straight, but I really had not much to go on since the last really distinct feature I saw was a solid 100m behind me. I couldn't find it, bailed out to the trail, tried again, missed, bailed out again, determined where the hill was, and then tried again and got it, but lost multi-minutes in the process. I suspect the second time I was close and just didn't see it.

The mistake was quite demoralizing and confidence blowing, so I made a mistake on the next leg when I let other people make me think I'd gone too far (I hadn't).

I think the conclusion from this race was that there is a line between aggressive and reckless, and I went over to reckless. It would have been an extremely short detour to go off to the left slightly and hit the trail to give me a good position to attack the control with, but I decided to go straight, because.... well, Euros go straight. But with a little bit of invested time I would have saved tons of time in retrospect. It was a high risk - low reward endeavour that blew up in my face. After 7 legs of going almost completely straight, I need to take route choice on a leg by leg basis rather than have a one size all solution for everything.

On the other hand, a few years ago would I consider "go straight" a solution for every control? Hell no. So that's a plus!

Another rest day! Weird, right! I did go for a 20 minute jog, but have decided not to log it due to its incredibly short and slow nature Did play a bunch of beach volleyball in the afternoon, though, that was nice. The sand was sore coarse and rather painful that it did wonders for the smoothness of my feet.

Day 2 of KRV went just a little bit better. After, of course, number 1. I was super resolved from yesterday not to blow it again, and I did, but not nearly as much. I thought I was being quite careful, but I was still struggling with focus and wound up not really staying on my bearing after I crossed the (actual) clearing. I got sucked up a different re-entrant and running along a different hillside which I should have caught on to with my compass because it was aligned in a different direction and wasn't nearly as steep.

I then tried to relocate and found myself again unexpectedly because the place I thought I was was not that place.

Number 5 was a significantly improvement, though, I felt better about that tough leg on a vague flat hillside, and generally other things went quite well except I left 6 reading from 8 on the map, so nothing really made much sense for about aminute until I realized I was looking at the wrong leg. I think it was because I was so overjoyed about just having found a random boulder in a total flat area.

Inexplicably, after one day of KRV, we had a rest day. Why? Apparently its because this is part race, part summer holiday for most people. Okay, fair enough. After getting up and lazing around for what was an eternity, we finally we for what I thought was a little jog at about 1PM. I'm usually in the dark about these things. I then learned we were going to do a point to point run that was about 16km long. This was a little surprising considering the other races, I wouldn't have expected there to be much interest in a somewhat longer run than that. However, it also turned out that this run was really quite slow, and for the first 4 km we pretty much only ran the downhills. I figured at this rate 16km would take us about 4 hours.

Fortunately, the trail got much flatter and we actually ran most of it. It was quite a nice trail, not very well travelled and occasionally we had to make some decisions on where we were to go next, but we got there eventually and it was a nice day and a nice time.

And then we ate at a "Starburger" attached to a gas station. It was not nearly as awful as I expected.

Kainuun Rasti Viiko - Disaster #1... I mean, Day #1.

I haven't blown it like this in an awful long time, and wow, it does not feel good. What happened? Well, I took my sweet, sweet time finding number 1, and it really comes down to becoming too fixated on reading the vegetation over everything else.

Basically, in this forest, there were different types of white forest. The control I was heading to was up a slope, where down the hill to the right of the control was some rough open with undergrowth. I thought, cool, I'm following along this hill, cross the stream, run along the side of the hill until I see the open in the distance, and head up the hill.

At this point I'm not 100% clear on my thought process, but for the first few moments of that I wasn't really running towards anything, I crossed the stream, and then ran in a forward direction. Why I was doing that and where I was going, I'm not entirely clear. Eventually when I got my head back on straight, I realized I had fully lost contact from the map and had no idea where I was. I tried to relocate, and was incorrect, and eventually made my way back to what SEEMED to be the rough open. The forest was distinctly different, you could see very far because the tress were no taller than me, and the footing was kind of rough. Rough open, right?

But, this rough open was much bigger than what I thought was on the map, like, much bigger, and it went way up this hill. Where the hell was I? I speculated that I was in rough open way, way, west of the control, so I headed back towards the other edge to hopefully spot a large lake and that would make things super obvious and I'd be back on track.

No lake. This open area wasn't shaped anything like the open on the map.

I regrouped again and started piecing small things together. End of stream, walk up hill, spot big rock, cliff, and then.... inexplicable open area??? I tried to stay on my line but veered back and forth because surely I'd gone too far right. I went back to the cliff I was sure I was at, and at long last spotted what was even MORE open than before, which opened my eyes to my problem.

Yes, I noticed there was a distinct vegetation boundary, but I didn't understand that this so called open area I was wandering through was ACTUALLY a different type of white forest. This revelation made me realize exactly where I was (relative to that cliff, I was correct), and where I needed to go. Unfortunately, that was many, many minutes later.

And this was to number 1. What. A. Disaster.

In light of the fact that I had now run myself out of contention for H21A overall in a span of 1 control, I tried to refocus, get my head back on straight, and do some things right. Unfortunately my brain just did not get in the right frame of mind and I was constantly distracted by irrelevant thoughts and occasionally, no thoughts at all. Very Homer Simpson-esque.

Sure, I nailed a few controls when going straight across a featureless flat marsh, but I still could not get a handle on the vegetation boundaries further along the course.

Its races like these that make me quite humiliated to pull on a Terä jersey. I mean, the other guys make mistakes too, sure. But not like this. Not at all like this.

No time to train today, just sit in a caravan and wait at untold number of rest stops for ride changes and coffee stops. Man, Finns drink a lot of coffee.

One more running session around Laajavuori before my month of truth begins. Now featuring a lake at the end of the run! Yep, tomorrow I head off to Kainuu Rasti Vikko to run in not the elite class, which gets to do significantly less distance than the elite class, and no real longs and no 1:15000 maps. That's annoying. But, nothing I can do about it now but to run well and develop good habits. Then its two days back home and off to Sweden and then Scotland! Fun!

And expensive!

Well, what I tried to do was run around the lake and then up into Yliopistonmaki and around the trails, but I took a left when I clearly should have taken a right and ended up right down at the bottom of the hill again. At that point I sort of shrugged, and kept running around the lake and some of the neighbourhood and back to Liikunta to finish off. Not exactly the length of run I was hoping for, but okay nonetheless, I suppose.

Oof, my stomach did not agree with this run one bit.

Not one bit at all.

Canada Day track workout! Featuring new spikes! Did I buy XC spikes for no real reason other than they were 30 dollars? You bet. And now I finally came up with an opportunity to use them!

Ran to Harju (not in the track spikes), and then did a variation of a nice speed workout I've done a few times, 4 x 400m, 6 x 200, 6 x 100m (basically, 4x1min, 30 secs, 15secs). On average they were slightly longer than their time brethren, but it was about the same idea - run fast for around that time. The 400s made my legs nice and jello-y for the 200s, but by the 100s I felt like my legs had found their fast muscles and it was cool to run fast on a track in spikes. Way cool.