Training Log Archive: ndobbs

Trekvällars
Nacka

Evening 1
Who doesn't enjoy racing on Nacka? Runnable, no big hills, some technical stuff, straight line is usually fast but you don't get punished for weaving.

Already made a 45s mistake at the first, but didn't let it get to me and kept the pace up. Then clean to the 8th, where I thought the control was on the crag, but no, the knoll above - 20s lost.

10 was a biggie, didn't come up on winsplits - it was a long leg, fastest time 7:30, I ran 10:45, almost a two minute mistake I reckon, maybe 1:45. Another 50s lost on 12, funny change in terrain made things seem strange. On the 19th I lost maybe 10s stupidly. Still only 13s off fastest split on a 2.5 minute leg :)
Apart from that, lost a bit weaving on controls 4 and 13, but not much.

Winners ran 51. Garmin distance 10.1. AHR 275 to 12; 180 from 12 to finish.

Dinner with AQ and GG. >Hundred-point winning-margins ensued :)

KTH Hallen

30 mins, of which 3*2 were hard. It was hot.

Overflowing with motivation, I am...

Calves were v tight on the train yesterday. Achilles is a tiny bit tender, nothing serious.

Watched some of the relays today. Not especially exciting but rather warm. Then got the rather warm train back to Stockholm. The weather is unreal. Didn't go swimming today :(

WC Long,
Fossum, Norway.

Chasing start.

It might conceivably have gone ok if I hadn't spent 15 minutes looking for my Emit brick before eventually finding it 3m to the left of the branch that had sent it flying.

I wanted to cry. I still want to cry.

C • Hug 3

Covered a Scandic towel with blood after slicing my hand swimming this morning. Broke my shin off a rock on the way to the second control after the associated foot went into a hole. Sliced my hand bigger climbing the mountain after the ninth. Re-opened a little-finger slice from yesterday. The Emit incident was 300m after the 19th control. The water after the 20th control had returned to a truck, 100m from where it had been and where I was. I waved disdainfully at the guy. 200m later my Camelbak ran dry, 3 and a bit k before the spectator control. The fence leading to the map exchange was still there. The poles that had been holding the fence had been taken down. The people staffing the map exchange and drinks point were lovely. The strawberry reception at the finish had run out of strawberries.

WC Middle,
Fossum, Norway

Öberg and Waaaalaar Kaaas won in 35:31.

I was 83rd out of 92 finishers. Crap, in other words. Physically I was ok but not good. No power, no zip. But much better than early in the week, at least.

A lot of the race I navigated competently, but made a couple of big mistakes and got a bit sloppy in the second half.

1 ok; 2 ok; 3 lost 30 seconds, kept the head and relocated easily; 4 ok; 5 lost 10 seconds on route choice and 5 or 10 by mildly overshooting the control; 6 ok; 7 lost 10-15s, used tv camera and cables in the circle :) ; 8 was the long leg, chose a good route I think, ok; 9 started ok, then lost maybe a minute, strange; 10 was diagonally uphill, looked scary but not too scary, but I misread a feature (hill on spur too small to be mapped, or maybe it was just a spur?) and made a 2 minute mistake, relocated on a big track! ; 11 lost 30s on zigzags, kept moving...; 12 was ok, got stuck for a bit behind a czech girl in the green, she didn't seem overly excited about her race; 13 I've just seen a nice non-obvious path option, certainly would have been faster than what I did... a little too far to the right of the line, lost 15s; 14 was hesitant a third of the way in; 15, 16, 17, 18 ok, maybe lost 5-8s on 18; 19 I was scrappy, staccato, weaved a bit early on and when I hit the paths, got annoyed with the paths so I went straight to the control :) ; 20 I got confused by a teepee, eventually decided it wasn't (the boulderfield) on the map; 21 oops, caught on tv too, and visible to the arena... I seem to enjoy public embarassment... 20s lost.

So at that speed, 46 would have been a good time... but I can run faster than that (or used to be able to).

Nice swim in the sea, 20+C. Followed by bad pizza. Hope I'll have some energy tomorrow. Gonna be loooonnnnnnnggg

C • 46? 3

WC Model,
Fossum, Oslo, Norway

I need to go back to school. Racing in this is going to take a lot of discipline, making sure there is a plan for each leg which makes it simple, or at least minimises the scope for mistakes.

Beautiful!

Long drive from Stockholm yesterday, shared with JAM. Not much sleep in the hostel with comings and goings during the night... so guess what? Yep, I'm tired :)

C • Good.. 4

Rest HR down to 147, but took some work... still not fully better.

Part of the problem was the large and tasty meal I made myself yesterday evening, so despite going to bed at 10.30 like a good boy, I didn't get to sleep until 12.30 or so. Then I woke up at 4.30, and sleep was broken thereafter. The blinds get quite bright when the sun shines directly on them in the early hours of the morning.

Sommarserien was at Flatenbadet south of Sthlm. To go there I was supposed to get a lift with a dumb blond. Excerpt from conversation:

me: or take T-bana to skanstull and then my car :)
DB: is an option but not so nice :)

So I went to Gullmarsplan to wait for them. And waited and waited. After three attempts they decided against driving through Sthlm, went back to Hjorthagen, and took the T-bana to Skanstull. Only wasted an hour and a half of my time.

Flatenbadet is a nice place for orienteering, detail-rich white forest. Went for a wee swim after. After dinner I won 10kr is a bet with DB.
DB and AQ:


Before running (and after!) I was missing 6 on one and 8 on the other:

C • well done andrew! 2

Rest HR down to below 50, but only just. Still a ways to go.

C • Not so good... 2

another day where I carry training gear to work, but don't bother. Another day off is probably more useful. Zzzz

got up for breakfast, went back to bed. HR has trouble dropping into the 50s, 40 are out of the question

still knackered after another 3 hrs in bed.

three wins out of three over at gg's

there was no love shown

C • you was lucky 2

half in the morning, half in the evening

Lovely morning training in Karsta, halfway to Uppsala.

Course planned by gg, aq also there.

Followed by lunch, carcassonne and so on in Hjorthagen

Evening training near Domarudden, from Nytorpsvägen. Nice area, tired, so went slowly. Started noticing all the inaccuracies in the map. Nothing too far from where it should be or horrendously wrong, but it just wasn't drawn with care.

Feels like I still haven't recovered from noc/wc/jukola.

dinner and dvds at Andrew's. Rest tomorrow.

C • there was no love shown 1

I had two days off this week, and one easy day, so it feels like it should be classe as an easy week. But the total hours run is higher than usual... maybe it's normal I'm tired. It'll take some effort to get next week down to four hours, but I might try. Maybe if I run really fast in the long distance :)

lots of maths today.

Didn't go into the office, so no exercise bike. Some core strength, otherwise an easy day.

Who knows what the weekend will bring?

caught up again. Must be time to train some :)

sloow run along the south of sodermalm. I was going to run on the other side but the bridge was up again.

did some good stretching. hopefully tomorrow I'll be full of energy :)

up "early" for a run on Angarnssjöäng, near Vallentuna, with gg and jam.

I bailed after 55 minutes. Still tired. Lovely day, nice to be out on a map, going from hilltop to hilltop.

At WOC I'll have to run a minute, maybe two, better than this.

Started updating my log, from 1st June... I've almost got to the WC middle distance

C • eh 3

As far as I can tell, 120th was good enough for our club to have the second best third scoring team, after Delta, whose "second" team came in 92nd.

And I'm running Long and Relay at WOC.

Sommarserien in Ågesta,
Really nice orienteering, but a little too physical for me today, or a bit soon after Jukola. I ran hard for 6 controls and then off and on hard and then easy...

Lovely map. I'll be back.

Pizza with gg, ns and aq afterwards.

Mikkeli-JUKOLA

IFK Lidingö 3
Last leg

Ran with the camelbak which was a good idea. Ran strongly towards the end, did the last 5 and a bit km (straight line) in 31 minutes, despite a two minute error.

In the middle of the race I had some problems, hard to keep focus. It was scrappy, so it took mental effort to keep moving at a decent pace.

At least two poor route choices, lost maybe a minute on each. Another couple of minutes lost due to weaves and small mistakes.

At one point overtook a guy taking a leak. Turned out to be Greg Flynn :) He hung on to the back of me until I made the mistake, where he corrected fast. caught up with him at the ante-penultimate control, as did Orion 2. I took the straight route to the second last, gaining a good hundred metres... still a bit nervous heading in to the finish...

Dropped 4 places, 116 to 120. Could have been better.

Great experience, though. Jukola is amazing. Can't wait to run it on proper Finnish terrain :)

C • Next year's 12

Event: Jukola 2009
 

recovery jog

Event: Forssa Games
 

Around the lake by the hotel in Forssa, followed by stretching and lunch.

I've just been fed strawberries in bed by Kieran. Currently I'm more happy than worried.

Forssa Games this evening. At Jukola I'll be running last leg for IFKL 3 after gg dropped out of the first team. It's only a little longer than the NOC long :)

Tired. In bed most of the day.

pre/post race

Forssa Games

8:44 down on Novikov and Andersson, with 3 minutes of mistakes.

Ran hard most of the way, made a balls of the sixth, slow to the 7th.

weaves to 2 and 3.
Fun race, nice distance. Terrain was more Polish than Finnish.

WC Sprint Qualie

Only 33 runners would be in the final. Going through the men who qualified, the runners without NOC/WOC/JWOC medals are Lubina, 28:29 10km time; Christian Nielsen, who hasn't managed better than 6th, but won a couple of PWTs, Fred Tranchand (FRA) and Mattias Karlsson, who are just crap ;p

So I wasn't too worried about destroying myself. Still tried to run well. One dodgy route and a couple of small mistakes lost me some time... and fitness lost me a lot of time!

It was a moderately interesting sprint, good for regional level.

Too many races in too few days...

3 and a half minutes down on Muller.

didn't want to leave the warm-up map it was so nice. tried writing my name in gps-tracking in the field. warm-down in the arena afterwards.

WC/NOC Middle distance,
Salo, Finland.

Beautiful terrain, challenging course. With the one-minute start intervals I was already caught by a Dane on the way to the second control. He messed it up and I didn't... Also caught Giacomo here, who started one minute before me :)

flaked it to the forking control, from where I was on my own until leaving the butterfly... made a 20-30 second mistake on the 7th, lost 15-20 seconds hesitating and going slowly to the 8th.

Caught by a wee german who did a funny control exit, pulling me the wrong way, but corrected quickly, losing 15 seconds maybe. Nicolas Girsch also caught us here. They went left on the long 13, I went straight, arrived almost the same time. The also seemed to go left to the spectator... they flew away from me across the field.

By this point I was pretty tired, but kept pushing. Up a bloody mountain. And down the other side. A couple of hesitations and weaves, but otherwise ok, maybe 45 seconds to a minute lost between there and the finish...

Oberg ran 32:34!

Pretty good race, all things considered. Another 1000-pointer to add to my collection. I need to get so much fitter and faster, though!

The GPS tracking is unreal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jogging around the Sprint Model in Salo. Stretched afterwards, chatting with Alain Berger.

NOC Relay

Toppjoki area

Better run than the day before, that's for sure. Dave and Roar had solid runs so we didn't get lapped, for once, thanks be to dog... The first control had me scared but I got it fine in the end. Second was easy, Third I made a temporary balls of, but once in the area it was easy. Zigzagged a bit to six, 8 and 9 I made small mistakes on. Then clean and fast the last few controls, which felt good, especially after overtaking the second German team.

Event: Nordic Orienteering Championships 2009 (WCup 2009, 1&2)
 

NOC Long Distance

The first three controls went fine. Then I lost three minutes on the fourth control. Fourth control was also bad at the IOC. Hmmm. Anyway, took a bad route choice and then went to the fifth on the way, accidentally. Meant I had a fast split, 3 seconds off fastest, to the fifth control. Sixth was longer and I did it v well, less than 20% down. 7th, wasn't good the first couple of hundred metres of the leg. 8 made a balls, went down the wrong side of a spur, 1:20 lost. 9 and 10 were shaky but fine. Ate a wine gum going in to the drinks station, then lost the plot completely. GPS was able to say where I lost 13 minutes.

Oops.

That made the rest of the race really painful. I made another couple of mistakes (smaller) just after, then slapped myself and said "No more f***ing mistakes", which seemed to work.

Last one out of the forest by two or three minutes. Sad.

Hopefully part of this crap performance is due to the sore throat the week before... but I can't really blame it for me being shit. Physically I felt well tired from the eighth control onwards.

Apparently the map was called Mallisuunnistus ;p

NOC Long model.

Lots of fun, jogging around, wet, couple of wee mistakes but lovely runnability, not too hard either.

Looking forward to tomorrow.

Dinner buffet at the main part of the hotel is excellent. Especially if you turn up early :)

C • Mallisuunnistus 3

NOC training,
Vartsala

south of Halikko, west of Salo.

Lovely orienteering. Plenty of mistakes due to low concentration. Just enjoying the terrain :)

Ran part of it concurrently with Ruairi. Fun.

To and from the CentrumOK Sprint private rerun

Shorter one in 13:24, two thirds of the longer in 15:04. Managed to make a mistake in the longer one. In the short one, I hurt my ankle again so slowed down for a couple of hundred metres.

Ankle problem is from Sundsvall, jumping off a cliff and pushing the ball of the foot up hard.