Training Log Archive: W

I'm not quite sure WHY they decided to do a sprint training, apaprently this is the first time the club has ever done a sprint training at a training camp, but, heck, Halden, close to WOC town, I'm not going to complain. Not the most riveting practice in the world, but some clever route choice problems helped out with a few out of bounds fences. I guess it was basically like a recovery workout. Managed to jump super cleanly over some tall fences, so that was awesome. Maybe that's all gymnastics class! Yay gymnastics class.

P.S. Gymnastics class is over. Still can't do back handspring, not even handstand, but I did do a backflip on the trampoline!

First full day of training camp! Drove into Sweden for some mass start intervals with the guys. Firstly, I'm not wild about the maps, they seem.... old, for some reason. I don't know what it is, they just seem.... old. OR, maybe I'm just placing blame on something other than my poor performance without a compass. On these vague-ish hillsides, its getting pretty tough. Because these were intervals I ran much faster than my brain could handle, so when we got to about the 4th one, I was about 90% there until I really lost the handle on where I was and thoroughly lost track of everyone else as they ran off. My QR suggest I was going in exactly the right direction, just didn't go far enough.

Discouraged, after that things went quite a bit slower and I still made mistakes. I try not to get discouraged after every single session, but.... I do! (no further justifications - I have high standards). Just need to try to learn something from it and move on. I ask the guys afterwards what they saw on that particular leg I blew and they just point to a one-contour hill or a really subtle spur and I think "I don't recall seeing any of that stuff!" I think that if I had my compass, I probably would have taken a bearing from my last known location and found it relatively easily, but instead I wasn't certain of my direction and couldn't relocate until I went back to that place. Tough!

Night partner training! Timo was nice enough to go with me and give me some pointers for this training. We switched back and forth between legs, though I did all the long ones. Unfortunately, I've been on this map before, so there was an element of familiarity, and its actually quite an easy map as well. But, it was a solid confidence booster, I felt a bit better about my night abilities (though it will be all for naught later). The problem is, though, that Its not too tough at this low speed, but it gets so much harder if I try to run quickly.

Also, there was one part at the beginning when running across some open area with kallio underfoot that we were running directly into this giant full moon and everything was clear, it was awesome. Amazing evening to be out!

Long, long, looooong travel day to Norway for spring training camp! I wanted to work all of Monday so rather than drive with the boys from Sunday, I decided to fly early Tuesday morning, which would still allow me to train Tuesday afternoon. Unfortunately, this means taking the bus from Jyväskylä at 2AM to get to Helsinki for my flight at 7:15, fly to Oslo, then take the train down to Halden, which wasn't actually a train, but a bus, because they are doing construction on the train line. Eventually I rolled into Halden at around noon having about 2 hours of questionable sleep and a sore back, only to wait on the bench for 45 minutes for my ride to come. But, it was pleasantly warm and sunny, and I had my book about concussions in the NFL.

Unfortuantely, the training I did in the evening was not quite so pleasant, but mainly because of my own poor performance. This is a terrain where having a compass would have been really, really helpful, while running across these seeminlgly featureless hillsides running on a wing and a prayer that I'm going in the right direction. I was looking for these long sharp valleys on the way and I found them, but I was perceiving them as bigger than they really were, so it turns out I had just actually gone way right and was completely missing the control. I did a similar thing several controls later in areas of relatively flatness, where I would just randomly drift off in some direction and start kind of going at a 90 degree angle from where I actually wanted to go. Presumably, a compass would have stopped me from doing that.

I even got a little nervous on the way back to the car because I was no longer certain if I was actually running to the car or not. That.... would have been embarrassing.