Training Log Archive: jennycas

Out to the lighthouse & back on a comparatively cool morning, before packing up to leave Gilleleje which I'm a bit sad about; it's such a lovely town with all the thatched roofs (rooves?), and the accommodation owner even brought us cherries from his tree. The route went through some forest, some coastline, and a couple of tiny back laneways with perfectly neat hedges. It was wonderful not to need to check myself for ticks afterwards - in the past week I have removed no less than 8 from my person, although only 2 of them had got really stuck in :(

The day's travelling route involved:
drive --> Hundested (checking out Asserbo Slotsruin now that all the WMOC competitors weren't parked around it)
little ferry --> Rorvig
drive --> Sjaellands Odde ( visiting a twin-chambered burial mound on the way)
big ferry --> Aarhus
drive --> Hirtshals in preparation for ferry to Norway tomorrow. Staying at an 1895 seaside hotel which is actually about 1km inland from Tornby Strand, so it was a lovely evening's walk through the dunes past the holiday houses to the lifesaver-patrolled beach to laugh at the bogged people who had driven on it (channelling my spouse here).

C • Ticks 5

Hmm, Gribskov forest wasn't any more runnable today, and neither were my legs any better at getting through it. I was hoping for beautiful clear beech basins but instead we got medium-green young beech thickets, in the midst of one of which a pit had recently been dug in order for my first control to be placed upon a random feature. My 3rd control hid from me by virtue of my having crossed a track at a 45-degree angle to what I should have done, and it took me about 3 minutes of bracken-bashing to get to somewhere that I could work out where I should have been. Misread the contours on 4 and somehow overshot it in the green, went the long way around to 5 in the green, then we were out of the middle-distance stuff and into some decent longer legs, but I took a bit too long to realise that I should be looking at track options.

Took the left track route on the longest leg, which was about 1.5km, and got ahead of the woman who had left the previous control just in front of me, and I moved through the latter controls quite ok when the forest became more open, ending up in a chain of 4 through the final few short legs - and leading them all to the wrong last control, oops. Managed a better finish chute split than I have at any time earlier this week, but the sun was already brutal (on a day when Copenhagen made 29 degrees, and the commentators kept advising people to drink plenty of water and stay out of the sun, and to report any fires we might see!). Ended up equal 26th. Not really happy with being 34 min down on Simone; think I would have preferred to run around Tiisvilde Hegn again...

It was a really good fun week of races and amazingly well organised - even the huge map handout queues moved fairly quickly. I figured I should patronise the traditional Danish food on offer at the catering tent, so went and got some (non-Swedish) meatballs with mashed potato (yep, I saw them pouring the instant mash powder into the MagiMix) and lingonberry sauce, washed down with "lemonade" which turned out to be elderflower - my favourite. And afterwards we met up with Cristina & Melissa & Lukas for an afternoon at the beach :)

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.