Training Log Archive: jennycas

It had rained overnight and the forest was rather damp & humid, also with lots of brashings, plus patches of head-high bracken, and nettles which I safely avoided, but this was a fairly desultory jog, often a walk, primarily to see whether I could get a bit better at identifying each & every one of those darn rides which are individually mapped. (Annoyingly, I tweaked my ankle, which was probably karma for having added my two cents' worth to the AP JWOC sprint thread despite it really not being any of my business...). Definitely hope the forest is nicer than this tomorrow!

Anyhow, it turned into a gloriously sunny day, perfect for drying the washing, and also for visiting Nakkehoved Fyr, the lighthouse on the headland just east of town, where there is an interesting museum which is kind of a history of Denmark's lighthouses and has great views towards Sweden. Also it has a weather station, to keep Blairs happy :)

Gilleleje is such a great little town. The yachts in the harbour have flags from Sweden, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as Denmark of course. Nowhere else have I encountered a crab tank on the wharf, which is there purely for the purpose of allowing kids with nets to come along, scoop them out, insert them into the top of the wooden crab-race and watch them scuttle back down into the tank. I reckon Briohny's boys would love this!

C • Crab tank 5

So, it turns out that the church bells across the road from us chime every hour, day and night - and I heard all of them. At 6am I admitted defeat and went for a nice stroll down to & along the beach, since it's only 2 blocks away. Before 10am I was back at the Tisvilde Hegn arena, and 4 hours later I was finally running...

Had kind of forgotten that I'm actually NTB at middle distance navigation (middles are often in terrain which is too rough for my knees and ankles) but suddenly remembered this while I was trying to keep cool before the start, and thought about how I actually enjoy hunting for controls in low-vis light green. Took it very cautiously through the first few controls, saving energy for the arena passage - which was indeed down a hill into the basin in order to run through the crowd and up the hill on the other side - and more than once I passed people in the green, slipped in and punched the control and headed off before they'd caught on :)

Am annoyed with myself that I didn't navigate properly to the control at the top of the spectator runthrough but just followed a herd of elephants into a patch of green. Legs & brain started to get a bit wobbly in the second half of the course and I didn't focus on my compass quite enough, so drifted a bit left on 15 & 16, but after that it was basically the end of the course and the last 3 controls were a gimme. Very happy to be only 10 min behind Simone Niggli (although I don't think she had a clean run) and guess I have to be satisfied with =22nd given that there were no less than 5 women in the minute ahead of me.

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...