Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

The morning after the day before, and it was ugly. It was already 30 degrees by 8.30 am when I headed out, and the thought did come to mind that I've taken in probably 5 litres of fluid since finishing yesterday, and very little of it has yet come out the other end (just as well there was no drug testing yesterday). It showed. The first half was generally uphill to the northwest, finding the shady side of the street where I could, then downhill and back into town. Had been planning 40 minutes but couldn't really be bothered, and this was really about loosening up (maybe it would have been better done in the pool).

Having had a collective lousy night's sleep, Pecs didn't seem to have much collective energy on display this morning. You get the same sort of feeling in Melbourne when it's been a 28-degree night.

I think I'll have trouble convincing Jenny that European travel normally works smoothly. Pecs-Zagreb should have been a reasonably straightforward trip with one change. Instead it had four. The first was when the conductor told us we should get off and get the fast train behind. When we did get off I was a bit worried because there was no trace of said train on the timetable, but it turned out to be an earlier one running two hours late. Then on the Croatian leg we had to do one section by bus because of trackwork. All of this was done on a 37-degree day and in vehicles which ranged from very warm to hot-enough-to-melt-toddlers-in-parked-cars.

And it's as well that I have company on this leg: my credit card has been problematical in European ATMs over the last year (because of incompatibility of different generations of chips), but in Croatia it doesn't work at all as far as I can tell, as either an ATM or credit card.

Things you don't get at an Australian event: the local fire brigade deploying their hoses to cool people down after their runs.

You can't ask for much more in a race than giving it everything you have, and today was a day when that happened. 13th in the long final was the absolute best I could have achieved and it's what I got.

We were sort of expecting a train to form around our start time, with Liggo 2 minutes ahead, and behind at 2 and 4 minutes the fast but erratic Russian Nikolay Sytov (who was in Australia a while back) and Bulgarian Ivaylo Ivanov, whom I considered a good top-five prospect who had run a bad first qualifier. I wasn't, though, expecting it to start so early when I saw Liggo halfway between 1 and 2, looking as if he wasn't quite sure what he was doing. We were sort of together for the next three legs; I got a bit of a lead on the long climb into 3, but he got ahead again when I took a drink on the way to 4 - early in the course, but water opportunities couldn't be passed up today (34 degrees, probably the hottest I've run a long race in).

5-6 was the big route choice leg, 2+ km across the width of the map. I thought the right route, missing most of the climb, was obvious, but it wasn't so obvious to Liggo and Nikolay (who had almost caught us by then) because they went different ways. I never saw Liggo again (he ended up blowing up and had to walk most of the last third), and Nikolay got enough of a jump on me to get clear. Ivaylo also caught me at 6 (which was close to half-distance) and was going faster than I could really handle.

By 40 minutes I had the feeling I was in a bit of trouble. In conditions like these you can lose a lot of time very quickly if you blow up, so I dropped back a gear, walking some of the steepest hills (although we were through the worst of them by then) and concentrating on making sure I hit every control, exactly. I seemed to find a pace that I could maintain; it wasn't easy but I didn't get any worse, and was continuing to hit control after control. By 17 I was starting to go through some of the early starters (and thought I'd seen Ivaylo behind me but was obviously mistaken from the splits), realising that I was on the verge of achieving the rare feat of an effectively technically perfect run, and switching into 'don't stuff this up now' mode. I wasn't that quick at the end but it didn't cost me anything.

I got pretty much everything out of myself that was possible today, both physically and technically. Obviously there have been times in the past when I would have been able to do much more physically - although the clock would, I think, need to have been turned back quite a few years to find the six-minute gap to the top ten - but there's no point in agonising over that. Perhaps I'll get back to an earlier level, most likely I won't, but for now this is a result to be satisfied with.

We leave Hungary tomorrow. Susanne (who, as most of you will know by now, won silver) and Lachlan go back to Budapest and on to Norway, Jenny will be joining me in Croatia for a few days before heading home. My next competitive stop is the Croatia Open, starting Wednesday.

C • Congrats! 7

Spent my last day as a thirtysomething doing not terribly much with the pre-final rest day, but did find the time to take to the water in the local pool, which was unsurprisingly well-patronised on a 32-degree day (although the wave pool had more crowds than the still pool where I was). Felt like the session went for a long time but smooth enough and will hopefully have relaxed some muscles. Time is a guess.

WMOC 2nd long qualifier. A better run technically today with no errors of any significance (a couple of 10-second hesitations was as bad as it got), but still lack the strength needed for the soft ground - every contour was hard-won today. Not pushing extra-hard in terrain where you need to be aggressive in the terrain. Not sure how much of an extra gear I'll have for the final but I guess we'll find out on Friday. (With 34 degrees forecast, Friday will be an endurance test too; having managed to dodge all the significant heat of the Melbourne summer, it will be the hottest day I've experienced since early last year). Stayed 11th, gaining one place and losing one (I thought I might have moved up a bit as it was a better run than yesterday, but it didn't happen).

This was a nice technical area - lots of depressions and not huge amounts of track running. There was a steep descent through green over the last few controls but to no-one's great surprise a big elephant track had developed by the time I got there (one wonders what it would have been like for the later starters).

Managed to outsprint a Swedish M70 in the chute (just), although Sus and Jenny still had faster splits than I did...

Liggo also qualified 11th from the other heat, which could make for an interesting battle on Friday. I think I get to chase him (by virtue of being in heat 2) but won't know for sure until the start lists come out.

First WMOC long qualifier, in what was essentially gully-spur terrain with some intensely eroded gullies - a bit like some Victorian mining areas, but perhaps more like the JWOC 1996 terrain in Romania, or the 2000 World Cup on Mount Fuji.

This didn't get off to a good start when I blew two minutes on the first control, not quite sure where I was alongside an erosion gully and overshooting. Took a couple of controls to settle myself down after that but eventually did, at least technically speaking, and didn't have any more significant problems other than a 15-seconder at 9 and a possibly suboptimal route choice at 8. Not happy, though, with the run physically - I shouldn't be tiring in a qualifier, although it was hilly (hillier, and probably greener, than the final will be) and quite warm. Particularly unhappy with the last 10 minutes.

Ended up 11th in the heat today, although our heat seems stronger than the other one (run on the same course) - would have been 7th there. This won't make any difference to me other than giving me a slightly earlier start for the final (no bad thing given Friday's forecast), but you wouldn't be too pleased if you were a marginal qualifier in my heat - the cut is currently 90 in ours, 102 in the other.

Today's assembly area was on top of a rehabilitated uranium mine, so if you see lots of older Australian orienteers glowing in the dark at the Oceania Championships this year you'll know the reason why.

Resy day between the sprint and the long qualifiers, most of which was spent at an IOF Event Adviser's workshop. Seemed to do more talking than all of the other workshop participants put together (although that may have been partially due to English not being the first langauge for anyone else other than Jenny).

C • Rest 2

C • climate change 2

WMOC sprint final, 17th. More of a running race than yesterday, run mostly in typical Eastern European (or Scandinavian) housing estates in the town of Komlo (which wasn't as desperate-looking a place as I'd expected somewhere whose economy was based on defunct-for-the-last-20-years coal mines to be). Not a lot of fine navigation, and not really that much major route choice either - some of the other courses I saw were considerably better in that respect.

I was a little bit slow right at the beginning but then got into it - certainly couldn't be upset with my mental intensity today, and ran pretty well. Didn't miss anything of any significance, the only wobble being a slightly iffy route choice on 12, right at the end, which cost me 5 seconds at most. Ended up about 2 minutes behind Janne Salmi.

I'm fairly encouraged by this as far as my long distance prospects are concerned; a top 10 should be within range if I can have a decent run in the final (although a lot will need to fall my way to get into the medals).

Susanne was the best of the Australians with a (very close) 5th. Hermann was 6th although the result lists claim him as British - as far as I know Hermann's only connection with Britain is that he was a POW there.

Jesus obviously didn't pray hard enough before the start - he missed qualifying by one place in M40-1, being squeezed out by Attila the Romanian.

WMOC sprint qualification in Pecs. A bit rough around the edges and lacking a bit of running sharpness but did the necessary, coming 9th in heat 1.

The first two legs were straightforward (the second was a complete-waste-of-space 400m road run which I should have used more for planning than I did). Got more complicated after that, although mostly in the form of solving you can't-get-there-from-here route-choice puzzles than the rapid decision making that can be called for in some European old towns. Avoided major mishaps, although took one wrong staircase and started up one dead end.

Tomorrow will be the big day. A result in the teens, which is what today's time points to, would be a par result for the sprint (although below par in the long).

WMOC sprint model, on a Communist-era housing estate on the south edge of Pecs, running a course which Amber set for us. Took a while to get much in the way of pace going but this was useful for getting my brain into sprint mode, doing a consistent job of looking for dead ends, awkward walls and fences and the like. Did start to go around a butterfly loop the wrong way but not huge amounts of harm done. A nice hit-out.

Jog back from sprint model area to base with Jenny, taking us through some of the less attractive bits of Pecs (featuring assorted factories which, I suspect, ceased to operate fairly quickly after the point at which they actually had to find customers for whatever it was they were producing). Enjoyed the fresh north wind, something that won't be with us next week.

Out on the second of the two training maps - this was reputed to be, and was, the better of the two with quite a lot of karst detail on its lower half. It was also the first part of a World Cup course from 1992 which Jim ran (the second part of it is on the WMOC final map), so we used the first eight controls from that course.

The karst detail is reasonably readable but there are certainly traps for the unwary in the greener parts - missed a bit of time on both controls in the green. Also ran for 50 metres the wrong way up a track from a junction, reopening nightmares from the 1996 World University Championships (where such an error put me into the wrong block of forest, something which I didn't recover from until 22 minutes later). At least it's better to do it in training. Not as good uphill as I was yesterday. The white forest is quite variable - some is very fast nothing-but-leaves-on-the-ground stuff, other parts have quite a bit of undergrowth and lower visibility.

We then moved along to the local lake, at least until beating a retreat in the face of an advancing thunderstorm. I've since discovered that the Hungarian word for radar is 'radar'. There aren't too many Hungarian words which bear any similarity to English, something I'd noticed on my previous visit when I was taken very much by surprise to see a sign in a back street of central Budapest saying 'TAB'. Taking a look inside revealed that it did indeed perform the same functions as an Australian TAB; I resisted the temptation to plonk a few hundred forint on something running in race 5 at Zalaergerszeg and moved on.

Several months later, I read a brief piece in the business section of the Sydney Morning Herald about how the NSW TAB had lost millions on a dud investment in Hungarian betting shops.

I started lying down at 9.40 last night, and my travelling companions tell me that I was asleep by 9.40.03....

Much better for that in the morning as we headed out to the first bit of training. This was the less inspiring of the two training maps, being fairly standard continental terrain with just a few small sinkholes, and was mainly useful for reacquainting myself with central European terrain - contours without a lot of definition and green that didn't always line up that well with what was on the map. (This map was fieldworked in winter, and 2010 was a very wet year in Hungary, so I wasn't hugely surprised - hopefully the WMOC maps themselves will be fieldworked in summer). Still nice to be out there, and stronger uphill than I have been in the last week. No controls out but set myself a course and navigated reasonably well with just a few minor wobbles, none of them more than 15 seconds.

We started/finished near a fun park (climbing walls, toboggan runs etc.). I was content to watch/laugh/take pictures of those who ventured onto the mechanical bull.

Pecs shows every sign of being a nice town to spend the next week and a half (and it will be hard to resist excessive consumption of the ice cream that is in abundant supply).

And it looks like WMO want me to come to Geneva a week earlier this November than last year. This is not something which causes me great distress given the timing of a certain well-known event in Italy.

C • Street orienteering? 1

Event: WMOC 2011
 

Evening shake-the-cobwebs out session in Pecs with Jenny and, once we got to where he was staying, Jim. My trip over went as smoothly as Jenny and Sus's didn't - the only flight connection which was late was the one which didn't matter, the Sydney-Hong Kong one which meant that I had 6 hours in Hong Kong instead of 6 1/2, and the only other glitch was that the airport ATMs didn't like my card, so instead of offloading my leftover Hong Kong dollars at a lousy rate in Australia I offloaded them at a lousy rate in Hungary instead, generating enough local cash to pay the fare from the airport to the main station and buy some $2.25/kg bananas. Still, it was a long haul - 42 hours door-to-door - I was less than fresh, and it showed on the run which was a bit of a struggle. Started raining a bit towards the end.

We're staying almost right in the centre of Pecs - a fairly basic place but it will do the job. It's on the sprint qualification map which is a bit unusual. Warmish (mid 20s) and a bit humid but certainly not as hot (yet) as I thought it could have been (and the system which was forecast to bring 37 to Paris yesterday - not sure if it did or not - seems to have missed us).

C • banana envy! 5

Melbourne-Sydney-Hong Kong-Helsinki-Budapest. So far so good (although I've only got as far as Sydney so far).