Training Log Archive: murraystraining

Brown course on Glen Dye. Love this area so much, worth the five hour round trip any day. Started aggressive, silly mistake at 8 then ran out of fizz a bit - tired after yesterday. Looking forward to returning to the forests of Deeside next weekend!
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Scottish Hill Running squad day. Kicked off with good talk by Chris Robison then a set of hill reps from Alva.
5 x 5mins, 2min recoveries.

Core session let by Casey. Much tougher than any core I'd done before. Lots of new exercises to not do in the future!

M14 course from British age group sprints at stirling uni. Good flow.

Cruise to capelaw road.

The "Canon" run. After popping past Canning Street & Canning Street Lane I dropped my bag at work then headed down the Royal Mile to Canon #1 - Canongate. Bumped into Ross Sanderson on his way to work then skirted round Calton Hill on the way to the second batch of Canons: Canon Lane, Canonmills, Canonmills Bridge and Canon Place.

1x1000m - 2:57 ok
2x800m - 2:18, 2:19 good
3x600 - 1:42, 1:44, 1:48 ouch
4x400 - 68, 70, 70, 70 think I should be faster than this?
5x200 - 32, 32, 32, 32, 32. Reasonable finish.

I think I'm lacking a bit of absolute top speed at the moment so I struggled on the shorter reps. Moderately happy with this session - 7km of sub 72s laps can't hurt in the long run!

Hoppy jumpy stuff.

Easy trot out to Candlemaker's Crescent & Park, about the furthest street from home in Edinburgh.

How bloody hard do the IOF make it to be a sprint specialist? I've just discovered that the PostFinance sprint, which I'd picked out as one of my real beacon races pre-WOC, is only open to the top 40 in the World Cup at that point. So that's 1x sprint, 1x long and 2x middle to qualify for what will probably be the second best sprint race of the year.

I know that I should have checked this earlier and if I knew what I now know it would probably have influenced my decision not to go to EOC (insofar as I had control over that - wouldn't have been easy to get time off work) so I've no one to blame but myself but the point still stands that if is blooming hard to get opportunities as a pure sprinter.
At NORT you have to qualify through a highly contrived middle-distance-sprint-map-loop-race-with-1min-start-interval faff to run the sprint final.
When EOC was funded they were never going to take an up-and-coming sprint specialist for just the one race (and having seen the costs involved this year it's hard to argue with that logic).
Which moreorless leaves WOC - but if you've no history of good results, good luck getting an opportunity there!

Sure there are PWT and Elitserien style races but they don't hold the same prestige, you don't travel to them as part of the team and they will invariably clash with something. I appreciate that the Orienteering World Cup is trying to determine the best orienteer in the world but do they have to make it so damn exclusive???

C • Strongly worded letter? 5

Next AZ is miles away and I'm trying to cut back the miles so I feel fresher for the fast stuff. So more repeats of the old school morning run loops!

To the track.

Advertised session was 3x3000m which pre-virus I was pretty psyched for hitting hard. Post virus I decided it was the perfect way to test the water for some harder running: treat it as the Dr Jack tempovals session with an option to up the pace if it felt OK.
First rep: perfect 80s laps all the way. 9:57, comfy (as you'd hope!)
Second rep: again, perfect 80s up to 2km then put the foot down with a 33/70/71 for 2:54 third km, just to test the systems out. (9:34)
Third rep: after recovering from an attack by the Gingerbread Man I stuck with Keith and Mickey through the first km (3:08), moved to the front for the second (3:07) and tried to pick it up at the start of the third but quickly ran out of enthusiasm for that plan and cruised in behind Keith (3:12 - 9:27).

All in all a good session and a lot of positives after the last few days but enough bad feeling in the last rep to tell me that it would be foolish to try to return to racing at the deuce tomorrow night. Shame, was hoping for a good thrash.

Three easy laps.
Three easy laps with strides on home straight.
Three kilometres back to Dalry.

Moving well.