Training Log Archive: jennycas

Tisvilde Hegn, very close to where we were yesterday, which had been an easy drive then, but those of us who were at the Scottish 6-Days in 2015 knew to allow an extra hour to get into the car park, and were grateful when it only took half an hour...

The arena was one of the best I've seen, set in a natural amphitheatre deep within the forest, with a finish chute that circumnavigated the base of the basin, and a footbridge back over the chute, where long queues of finishers formed at times. Not sure how they're going to work a spectator leg/arena runthrough into that setup (but that's tomorrow's problem).

The forest was soft, fast and dusty and mostly it was possible to go fairly directly but sometimes I came out to a bigger track rather than trying to count all the little rides. Don't feel that I lost much time but perhaps could have got better lines through the low-vis and/or been more efficient in the control circle a few times, so that could add up to a couple min. As I finished I heard that the qualifying time (22nd place) for the other W40 heat was 57 min, but then I looked at the results from my heat and saw just how many people there were less than 3 min ahead of me, and that didn't fill me with confidence. In fact I ended up 18th and 22nd place cutoff was less than a minute behind me :(

Now staying at Gilleleje, which is a lovely seaside locale with a fishing-boat harbour. Not quite sure how to pronounce the town's name but I think swallowing at least half the L's might help. Our accommodation is decidedly more compact than in Copenhagen - I can't even stand upright in my tiny loft bedroom - but has a lot more character and a more robust staircase.

P.S. Ricky, a tabby cat has already come to visit us!

C • You qualified! 4

Jogged around all of the controls which were available on the model map, trying not to trip on either the wild raspberries, other orienteers, or the contours, some of which were pretty subtle but made more sense once I realised they were @2.5m intervals. Afterwards, since Tisvildelege is right on the ocean, I jumped waves for a bit (I figured Zara would have done so). Breathtakingly cold, and helped improve my sunburn 'hangover', but I'm still not sure whether this was technically the North Sea or the Baltic?

C • Thanks 3

Arena; Christiansborg palace, which is the Danish parliament. Start: the far end of Christianshavn, so my course didn't get the interesting rampart-gardens. In fact it was fairly straightforward although with a couple of decent left/right route choices. I ran as hard as I could but unfortunately didn't notice that it's not possible to get up the stairs to the road on the southern side of the bridge (currently blocked off as a construction site, and the map does show this, but I had just made an assumption that bridge access would be equally valid from all points) and so the 20 sec required to backtrack to the north side were enough to drop me from 19th to 24th, which I was a bit sad about, but then I realised that I'd probably equally lost that time while waiting to get through crowds/dodging around people. And now that I've looked at the splits and seen that the legs where I had higher placings were the ones where I'd actually noticed the traps (also on the last control where I just looked up & could see it from at the one before) I feel a bit better, especially since unlike last year, I hadn't specifically trained for sprint...

Warmed down by jogging with Blair when he went to the start, then walked casually back along the waterfront getting rather sunburned in the process. After the presentations we went in search of proper coffee, ice cream and mermaids (I always feel a bit bad that the poor dear is overwhelmed by the crowds of humans) and explored the Castellet (star-shaped fortification with moats), from near which it was possible to catch the one bus all the way back to our accommodation about 6km west of the city, in time to get scrubbed up to go out for dinner at my favourite lakeside BBQ restaurant with Kirsten & Bo and other current/past South Aussies.

New experience for me being in an age class which is big enough to have heats - 84 women in W40, so top 21 from each of 2 heats should go through to the A final, and I'd been a bit concerned when I saw how many of my nemeses were in the start list, that this might not be easily achievable.

Feeling surprisingly non-bad before the start (yay, drugs!) and told myself that I just needed to have a clean run and probably should qualify ok. But the flat course tempted me to run fast, and I was trying to stay ahead of the woman who'd started a minute behind me...she ended up beating me by 2 min, but that was partly because I wasted a minute on a near-disaster which was a cascade of events:
a) come around the building, across the carpark, turn left behind a hedge & punch a control;
b) leave the control to the south, passing another control on a hedge in the narrow gap between buildings, but then finding that I had run into a dead end so I needed to;
c) head back north in order to go around the other end of the building, thus passing the control which I had punched and realising that it had been the wrong control;
d) head south again to punch the control in the narrow gap where I had just been, which was indeed the right one;
e) head north around the building and on to the next control, thinking briefly how much of a near-miss that had been...

Pretty horrified by my brain-fade (obviously running faster than I was thinking) but very relieved to have held it together for the rest of the course, and in fact I ended up equal 15th in heat B *phew*. Would like to be higher than 30th in the final though!

C • Sometimes... 6

Event: World Masters Orienteering Championships 2018
 

Feeling a bit flat today even after a morning stroll around the environs of Kronborg Slot (AKA Shakespeare's Elsinore) and rather daunted to hear that the indoor-O would take 40 min, because I didn't think I could concentrate for that long all by myself, so I invited WATash to come around with me, because two heads are better than one, right? And also because a shared experience is so much more hilarious...this really was fun, a bit like Cluedo (Ms Orienteer, in the Library, with a Piano) and also really complicated and I kept getting so confused about which stairs it was allowable to go up vs down. Couldn't believe how much effort the organisers had gone to to arrange all the chairs & desks in the most complicated configuration possible, and map them accordingly. And of course there was a control on/in the toilet!

The only downside was that after all the stairs, my knees hurt so much that I couldn't manage to run at all for the model event and I had really been wanting/needing some practice at fast sprinting, but I guess it's too late to get race-fit before tomorrow's qualifier anyway :(

There's something weird about the accommodation we're now in: the bedrooms upstairs are fairly normal and so too is the living area downstairs (although pre-cleaned cutlery would surely not have been too much to ask for) but for it to be possible to get upstairs, a circular hole has been cut in the kitchen ceiling and the world's most steep & rickety spiral staircase installed with truly bodgy fastenings. I didn't know you could get staircases at IKEA...

8am train Stockholm-Gothenburg (you even get a 'breakfast box' in first class, and the coffee is not *quite* as bad as airline coffee), where I thumbed a lift with Blair and since we had intentionally both brought the model event map from WMOC 2015, went orienteering on Gothenburg granite, with its distinctive north-south ridges and where bare rock is actually even sometimes mapped. I'd been looking forward to this, and more generally to orienteering in Europe because it would be soft underfoot, but in fact everything is so dry currently (this reminded me of Mt Beckworth in March) that my knees have been gradually getting worse over the past couple of weeks, and I couldn't really manage to run so this turned more into a blueberry-sampling expedition. That didn't stop me from having room in my tummy for an entire Swedish pizza afterwards!

Crossed Helsingborg-Helsingor on the ferry called Hamlet and stayed at the YHA right on the coast (surely a faded seaside hotel from the 1920s) which was full of golden-haired children all presumably on a summer camp, although there didn't seem to be any definite adult supervision.

I'd managed to print off a sprint map of the southern part of Sodermalm, so set myself some sprintervals and walked 2 km to get there (somehow completely failing to find Stockholm Sodra station on the way; I do now know where it is for tomorrow morning). Legs very stiff from last night - partly due to running to/from start on paved paths in spikes - and didn't want to be made to move, but this was at least a good mental route choice exercise and also practice for running around in the noonday sun.

Also, I know Lizzie will believe me even if no one else does: I saw a snake! Just a skinny little thing but it was about 80cm long and made its way up the gutter, across the footpath and under a gate...wonder what kind it was?

C • Snake ! 9

Fed my knees anti-inflammatories and decided to walk not jog the 1.7km to the start. Goal was to run a bit harder today and to always remain in contact with the map. This did mean that I took some wider track routes, but only one resulted in then having to scale a cliff at the end (bare rock being unmapped, it had appeared as just a steep slope on the map...). I feel satisfied that I executed the end of the leg well each time, with the greatest hesitations being when the map showed me the control centred on a small gully but the description said "broad spur" - which happened on no less than 5 separate occasions! I was running around the same pace as a few M50/55s on the same course, and think I wouldn't have been quite so far down either of those age classes as on the previous 2 days.

C • Welcome to Stockholm! 3