Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Significantly faster than any other swim I've done in recent times, for no obvious reason - got going nicely after the first couple of laps. ('Fast' is a relative term - at its fastest I was still only going a few seconds faster for one lot of 100 metres than the much-maligned Australian relay team were doing for four of them). Definitely felt like I was putting a bit of work in.

As always in winter, Fitzroy was in 'nice once you're in' territory.

It's been a good day, with my best swim of the year and the submission of another significant paper (with a whole 9 1/2 hours to spare), and that continued with my best interval session of the year, a 10x1 minute session on the south side of the Yarra. Sometimes this can be a bit of a nothing session but I felt pretty pumped for this one, and despite never feeling entirely without sore spots, kept getting faster and faster (again a relative term compared with some of you, but it was good for me). No distance measurements unfortunately. Kept shifting my start mark back to keep the running time at 1 minute and ended up about 35 metres further back for the last one than the first.

I've had a few false dawns in recent times in speedwork sessions after coming back from overseas, so won't get too excited yet, but there were some promising signs in the Lausanne sprint before I altercated with a log the next day. At the very least it suggests I have something to look forward too on the next couple of weekends.

Going to/from Yarra's Edge.

I clearly wasn't the only person scrambling to make the IPCC deadline - so far today the journal I edit has had 12 submissions. Normally it takes us three months to get that many.

The plan was a run starting from outside the Fitzroy pool followed by a swim. Wasn't entirely awake for a lot of this run, but nevertheless started to flow pretty well by around halfway and certainly ended up better than Monday runs often do (probably a product of an easier Sunday).

And then I discovered I'd left my wallet at home, which meant it will have to wait until tomorrow before I swim one lot of 100 metres slower than the Olympic relay teams do four of them, and resulted in some reworking of transport plans, going back home and then getting the train. It may have been as well that I wasn't on the bike, because there was a bit of action today on my usual commuting route, in the form of the police paying a visit to a well-known local social club with an interest in motorcycles. Presumably they suspected that illegal activity was taking place on the premises. I can't work out what could possibly have given them that idea.

Melbourne Bush O at Woodlands, much of it in the semi-open parts but with a few proper areas of bush in the middle. This is the area where I last broke 5 min/km three years ago; I didn't get close to that today (although did get just under 6s), which could be attributed to any or all of the following:

(a) sleep disruption due to jet lag
(b) sleep disruption due to Olympics watching
(c) coming off a long(ish) run yesterday
(d) La Nina and the consequent growth of long grass in places
(e) lack of a relay first-leg pack for competitive pressure
(f) three tricky creek crossings which actually had significant amounts of water
and just possibly (g) I'm getting older and slower with every passing year.

Beforehand I thought this was going to be a real struggle, but loosened up with a warm-up. It still wasn't great and I suspect my scalp will get claimed by some non-usual suspects as it has in the last two such events (although, this time, not Dion, who is otherwise engaged with two-day-old daughter). Missed about 30 seconds on 6 after not reading the rock properly, and also lost a bit of time on 2 where the mapping was a bit marginal. Also found the tussock grass hard work at times - I may have cut up an ACT cross country field in tussock grass back in the day but it definitely wasn't smooth to get through today.

This series is bringing out a lot of non-regulars, some new to the scene, others people we haven't seen for a long time. Today's nominations for the latter category include Darren Southwell (good ACT junior of the early 2000s, and fellow resident of Mirning Crescent, Aranda) and David Rowlands (accompanied by mid-teens daughter).

On the way to the event I saw a car with a sticker 'Never pay unjust traffic fines again' - but not for very long as it was doing at least 90 in a 60 zone.
(Some googling revealed that this was an ad for a website citing dubious legal loopholes and proudly boasting 'political support from the new One Nation Party').

And where else but the Olympics would you see a headline (from the Guardian): 'Handball heroines go down fighting to Montenegro'?

Did this after watching a chunk of the opening ceremony but any Olympic inspiration was missing, on a run out through Ruffeys Lake Park which never looked like catching alight and was a struggle on hills throughout, and for the last 40 minutes or so. Quads feeling particularly tired. Not obvious what went wrong although perhaps didn't eat enough last night pre-football. A little shorter than I'd planned on as I was running out of time (to take my parents to the airport), but I didn't mind an excuse to cut this one a few minutes short.

It is grand final day in the main private schools' football competition, and large 4WDs were much in evidence around the host venue at Bulleen. Not in a large 4WD was a driver who abused me a few minutes from home because I was crossing a road he wanted to turn right into - definitely an indication I'm not in central Europe any more.

C • Glad that 1

Pool running at Ivanhoe with the usual crowd. Today's topic of discussion - notable suburban football brawls, which moved on to mentions of the old Army Reserve Cup and the name John Bourke. Those Victorians of a certain age will remember.

Friday's not a normal running day for me but Monday's not a normal rest day, hence the unusual lunchtime session today. Out to the Tan again. Never anything to get too excited about but did miss the rain. Would probably have been better off missing the football, too.

C • Football 2

This time slept through, more or less, to my intended wake-up time of 5.30, and headed out for a run longer than anything I did in Europe but slightly truncated from the usual (not that volume is going to be a massive priority in the next two months when my main priority is the Australian Middle and Relays), out to the north and west in a slightly different sequence to the usual - don't think I've done Mount Cooper (not that much of a mountain, but on an ancient definition of the metropolitan area marked on maps as the 'highest point in the metropolitan area') from the south-west before. Nothing special as a run but not too bad either. Seemed to go quite quickly in the final third.

Oddity of the morning was that I woke to a story on the ABC news of a political dispute in which I know both parties (Jenny Macklin for obvious reasons, NSW Disabilities minister Andrew Constance from school and because I did some maths tutoring for him when he was in Year 11 - so you can blame me if his numbers are dodgy). That wasn't the end of it because one of the main names in the Age's front-page story was Michael Magazanik (sometime orienteer and lawyer in a thalidomide case).

(There was a time when my standard Thursday morning long run wake-up call was then-NSW orienteer Alexander Stollznow doing the early morning finance report on the ABC).

I wouldn't have chosen to have such a busy few days on my return, but the IPCC deadline waits for no man or woman (to be considered for their next report papers have to be submitted by next Tuesday). Got the draft of a big one I was working on finished tonight (along with a smaller unrelated article).

With a massage session at 8 I didn't think I had enough time to do a run beforehand, so went at lunchtime instead. (As it turned out I had masses of time - I woke up at 4 and couldn't get back to sleep, which unsurprisingly led to some flagging from mid-afternoon onwards - but prefer not to do speedwork in the dark). Thought it might have been awful but ended up OK after the first rep - the fairly standard 250 on/250 off on the Tan.

Going to/from the Tan. As with yesterday, took a bit of time to loosen up. The Arts Centre is due to reopen this weekend, but they still haven't reopened the Southbank footpath yet - maybe next week?

A lunchtime session - wanted to sleep until 8 or so which didn't leave enough time for a run before work. Headed down around Fishermans Bend and along the waterfront to Station Pier. Strangely enough, half an hour on the train this morning set off the back/hamstring soreness that 24 hours on the plane didn't, and this was making its presence felt through the first 15 minutes of the run, but it eventually settled down and turned into a decent session.

Definitely knew I was back home when a too-fast big 4WD came through a suburban street in Port Melbourne.

Geneva-Dubai-Kuala Lumpur-Melbourne, stretching from Sunday afternoon in Geneva to the early hours of Tuesday morning in Melbourne. Didn't sleep as much as I would have liked but seems to have worked out OK so far - will be interested to see what difference the 1am arrival (and hence the ability to sleep immediately afterwards) makes to post-trip recovery.

I thought I might have had some company on the trip since the Sunday afternoon Emirates flight out of Geneva seemed a fairly obvious exit route for WOC people heading to Oceania or east Asia (as far as I know, no-one flies direct to any of the SE Asian hubs from Geneva, but the three big Middle Eastern airlines all do to their respective Gulf bases). As it turned out the company was the Muir family, as far as Dubai.

One plus of the route choice was that it didn't go through Hong Kong, which had a near-miss from what became a category 4 typhoon last night (although Jim says the flights got through OK, at least when he was passing through). I'd like to see a tropical cyclone sometime, but not really in the company of 20,000 of my new best friends scrambling for floor space in a foreign airport.

Seeing several people around me on the plane with little English struggling with the immigration form made me grateful that most EU countries don't require you to fill out forms - I certainly wouldn't fancy having to fill out a form in Finnish or Hungarian, say. Closest I've come to something like that was on the Kazakhstan trip when we were presented with a set of forms in either Chinese or Russian. I guessed that 'Nyet' was the correct answer to the question that mentioned SARS (which was much in the news at the time, although the epidemic ended up killing fewer people than die on Chinese roads in an average weekend).

And some above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty points to my parents, who are in town and came out to pick me up at 1am (although they're currently on the European sports time zone and 1am was early compared to what they'd stayed up to the previous night to watch Adam Scott not winning the British Open).

Started from the WOC office after sorting out the business I was trying to sort out last night, beginning east along the lakefront before half an hour of serious climbing, from the lake all the way up to the highest parts of Lausanne, probably about 300 metres all up. Did a section through the Sauvebelin forest (without seeing any bodies still recovering from the WOC banquet there the previous evening) before dropping back into town; got a little navigationally confused at that point but ended up getting back to the hotel OK (although with a sharp climb to do so).

This was a solid run without being anything too startling. Slower than I'd like, but feeling as if I was doing a reasonable job of grinding away on the big climbs - certainly feel stronger on these now than I have for much of this year at home. Quads suffered a bit on the descent from Sauvebelin.

So ends a trip which from the competitive point of view was rather frustrating because of illness and injury. It wasn't totally relaxing outside competition either because of what's potentially hanging over me on my return (although at least I've finally got as close to an assurance as I'm going to get that my legal defence will be covered if it comes to that). Might be a while before I'm back as I don't plan to come next year (nor do I have any work trips in the foreseeable future, after a hectic couple of years).

What's next is a bit of an interesting question, given that there will be no Australian Long Champs for me (I'm IOF Event Adviser). The Middle, where I've actually done pretty well in recent years, is an obvious thing to target (and having someone fresh to bring in for the relay may not be such a bad thing for the Nuggets). Also keen to do well in the Victorian Championships, especially given my past history on Kangaroo Crossing, which suggests there may be opportunities there.

Big downhill early dropping down to the waterfront at Ouchy, then along the lake shore to near the 5-Days sprint assembly area before coming back up through the suburbs. Went past the Australian WOC team accommodation (which I knew was in the area, but not exactly where) and swung in to see if I could see anyone, but they were obviously otherwise engaged. Fairly solid climbing for much of the last 20 minutes but handled it pretty well. Looks a bit slow, but the Garmin is evidently not doing me justice here as I saw it running backwards at one point on a set of switchbacks. Insect clouds (known in other parts of Europe as the 'Finnish Air Force') a bit of a nuisance at times.

Then it was up to the WOC relay - good racing at the front but a rather disappointing day for us. Also completed my stint on the jury without any formal protests - don't know how unusual it is to get through a WOC without a protest?

Chance encounter of the day was when I went down to the WOC office to try to get a refund for a double-paid invoice. They were 40 minutes late opening and also stuck outside was Marcel Schiess (Swiss Orienteering president and, until yesterday, IOF Vice-President), so we had the chance to have a good discussion about orienteering in Switzerland (among other things). Numbers-wise, they aren't the juggernaut that we might think they are - their number of active members is around 7,000, about double ours - and they have some of the same issues we have in areas such as getting much flow-through from their schools programs and finding people to organise major events. One big advantage they have over us is their level of commercial sponsorship, much of which is probably the result of Simone Niggli's very high profile (I knew I was in Switzerland on my November trip last year when I saw a picture of her and newborn twins on the front of the Swiss equivalent of "New Idea") - I wonder what will happen when she retires?

C • Sponsorship 2

Back in action with a fairly easy run which was as flat as I could make it in Lausanne. A little sore early on but fine after that, except for feeling a bit awkward on a couple of steep downhills (which suggested terrain might still have tested it).

This was an early start before a sequence of four back-to-back meetings which ran from 9 to 7.30. The largest of these was the IOF Congress, which worked about as well as could reasonably be expected given the complexity of the proposals being dealt with. I won't go through all the details of what was decided - you can read that on the IOF or WOC 2012 websites (and probably on World of O soon), but in brief, for WOC, a mixed relay is replacing the middle and long qualification (probably from 2014), with the actual qualification methods referred to a working group (in which I expect to be heavily involved). The Nordic proposal for alternating terrain and urban WOCs went down 20-16. We voted for the Nordic proposal, which I believe was the one which would best facilitate the genuine globalisation of the sport, but the eventual outcome is one I can live with, providing the qualification system gives smaller countries a reasonable chance.

(I'm claiming responsibility for the line some of you might have seen quoted on the World of O liveblog, about how terrain orienteering wasn't practical in some countries because the terrain was "too thick or too mountainous or contained animals that might eat you or people who might shoot you").

The other IOF item of note was that the JWOC beer relay and associated action, in which rumour has it that some of our number may have had some involvement, got a mention (not a favourable one) at the Foot O Commission meeting. Words may need to be had. (There is no truth in the rumour that issues caused by the availability of cheap beer in Slovakia in 2012 are why JWOC 2015 was awarded to Norway).

C • Beer relay 4

C • animals 5

C • Qualification 6

Leg had improved considerably today and I'm pretty sure I could have run on it (certainly in the city, not sure about terrain), but decided to give it another day and go swimming in the evening after the WOC long final instead. The pool this time was the Plage de Bellerive, a lakefront pool complex which, as all the signs told you, has been around for 75 years this year. (Those who know their European meteorological history - or who were at WOC in that year - will know why the number of patrons in 2003 was 50% higher than in any year before or since).

This swim seemed to drag on for a long time but was quite pleasant. No issues with leg. Pool a bit cooler than I'm used to but that's not a problem (not on a nice day anyway). Finished just in time to wander across to the WOC awards ceremony.

A couple of solid runs at WOC today for the Australian contingent although we still can't quite crack a place starting with a '2' (although it was looking possible at one point as various late starters had misadventures in the men's race). There was almost some work for the jury as a result of Fabian Hertner's disqualification (punched the women's 1 instead of his 13, 41 metres apart and on a spring and pit respectively), but in the end after going out to the site with the Senior Event Adviser the Swiss decided not to go through with a formal protest. (It probably would have been dismissed anyway, as similar-features-within-60m is a guideline, not a rule as the controls-within-30m is).

One nice feature of WOC is the couch for the current leader (some late time loss cost Aislinn the chance to spend a few minutes on it). Might have to look at doing this for next year's Australian Sprint - Eon tells me the ancient couch from the Year 12 common room still exists so maybe it can be pressed into service for this purpose.

C • I have a VIP couch 1

C • Heat 2

The leg had improved somewhat today but still wasn't good enough to run on (in terrain anyway). Suspect it's probably one or two days away. Instead I picked up a map at the start and walked a few controls.

This was a beautiful area, 1800 metres up in the mountains at Bretaye (the views looking south from the assembly area were especially stunning). It would, though, have been a brutally tough area to race on - the forest, where it existed, was thick and rough, and heavy spring growth meant there was a lot of grass and other low vegetation in the yellow, too. When I left, no-one over the age of 14 had broken 10 minutes/km on any course (81 was leading M40, which was 7.6km). There will be a lot of DNFs today, and a lot more exceeding the maximum time (2.30), if they enforce it.

(After I got back I saw Markus Hotz, a Swiss M40 who's a bit better than me and who was staying next to me at WMOC, and commented to him - he hadn't started yet - that anyone under 10s would be doing well; he said he was hoping to do 7s. My immediate thought was "he's dreamin' ". He ended up doing about 90 for 7.6, a pretty respectable result).

And perhaps the Lausanne police read my log (or alternatively Constable Frogga read it and tipped off Interpol), because this afternoon the drug dealers had been replaced by cops in gear not far short of full SWAT team level.

Update: as far as I can tell one person got under 10 min/km, just - Martin Hubmann did 113.46 for 11.4 in M21E. They drew the cut at 3 hours so 54 out of 85 made it (had they stuck to their original plan of 2.30, it would have been 32). Also some respect points for Alison Crocker (11.3 min/km in W21E), who I think was trying to show us what we were missing out on through her non-qualification (in the heat that Lizzie and Vanessa also missed out from) for the long final.

No go - felt a bit better today than yesterday walking, but tested it out running and it was obvious in the first 100 metres that a jog was going to be the best I could manage, and that probably not on rough ground. If it had been something like a WMOC qualifier I might have tried to push through, but not worth it for this. Not sure how long it will be a problem - my previous instances of severe bruising have taken about three days to settle but those have all been in the knee area, not the thigh.

The WOC middle race looked good from what I saw, although I didn't get to see a lot of it - I was on the men's start, so only got to see the early women and late men. One thing I did note at the start was that quite a few people took advantage of the timing gate (it's legal to start within 5 seconds either side of your allocated start time) - most jumped the gun by only a second or so, but two did it by 3-4 seconds. I'm not sure why there's any allowance at all (beyond whatever the uncertainty is in the timing system).

The observant may have noticed that I recorded a result, but this was actually Jim masquerading as me (and starting ~20 minutes late).

C • timing gate 4

Not a day I'll look on with any great pleasure from the competitive point of view, as we headed into some pretty rough Jura forest.

Not off to a great start with 15 seconds lost on 1 and 45 on 2, but then settled down OK technically - pretty clean through the tricky loop in one of the more technical parts of the map, including nailing the scary downhill legs at 5 and 9, though didn't feel as if I was running with any great fluency in the terrain. Still seemed to be getting into a reasonable rhythm when I had an argument with the end of a branch on the way to 10. It could have been a lot worse - I didn't see the branch at all and ran into it at full speed - and for a while I thought it was worse and I might have to walk in from the far end of the map, but I was able to get back into a run. Still, obviously unsettled by the pain, I lost time on four of the next five, none of them particularly significant but all of them annoying, and was rather in blah mode by the later stages.

The upshot was being 15 minutes down in around 15th, and a badly bruised thigh. It hasn't swollen up as much as I thought it might have done, but I'm not really walking comfortably tonight and the chances are still that my event is over (which is a pity as the next two days look pretty nice). We'll see how it feels in the morning. Can't be too upset when I compare it with the nightmare of Muz's WOC debut (last heard of on his way to hospital after doing some significant damage to his ankle).

Names from the past department: I was doing some reading on the train on the way to the event and saw a quote from one John Asker, an economist at New York University. (For those who have come on the scene in the last 15 years, John was part of the considerable wave of talent that came out of the ACT in the early 1990s and was in the 1994 JWOC team).

And tonight was a bit of an improvement on last night - tonight I've got back from the IOF Foot O Commission meeting at 10.45 instead of 11.55 like last night (and as an added bonus the resident drug dealers on the corner down the road are nowhere to be seen).

C • lnjury 5

C • Drug dealers! 2

C • 1

Swiss 5-Days day 1, a sprint on the WOC qualifying area. Pretty pleased with this one - certainly the best intensity I've run with on this trip and flowing well through the controls as well. A bit annoying to screw up an otherwise excellent run with a 15-second overrun of 20; also came close to falling into the trap at 8 but picked it up just in time with only a few seconds lost. Tired a little bit towards the end - it was a longer course than anticipated (the WOC courses had been measured, as the IOF rules specify, as shortest possible route rather than straight line, and I'd assumed today would have been too, meaning a likely sub-15 minute time) and I started a little too fast for the race duration. Ended up 9th in an M40 field of 50-odd, about 2 minutes down. Will be interested to see what happens the next three days, although all but one of those ahead of me are Swiss and will have a certain home-ground advantage in the Jura terrain.

I'd thought beforehand that my latish start time - my request for early starts on the WOC days as a jury member was ignored - would have made for an interesting transport challenge, as I would have had 28 minutes after the start to run my course and get to the station (about 500 metres away) to get the train to the WOC area. Fortunately I was able to get a ride with Nick and Hilary. (A VIP parking sticker is a useful asset when trying to get rides...).

They're long days at the moment. After getting back from WOC, it was almost straight to a Foot O Commission meeting which ran almost until midnight (and tomorrow could be similar).

Was tossing up when to do this. Remembering what happened on the equivalent day last year, as a WOC jury member I thought I might have been taking my chances planning on doing a run in between the sprint qualifying and final, but on the other hand doing one before the event would have meant being up before 6 (my job was supervising the women's start so I needed to be there first thing).

Fortunately there were no protests this year - the closest we got was a couple of diplomatic incidents at the opening ceremony - the Chinese were aggrieved that the Chinese Taipei flag which appeared was their 'political' one and not their sporting one, and the Greeks, who might have done better to concentrate on improving their orienteering, were aggrieved that Macedonia appeared under that name and not 'The Former Yugoslav Republic Of...'. (The last I saw of Macedonian orienteering was when 15 of them sought invitations to attend the 1996 5-Days in Ballarat and only two of them turned up; I suspect I may have been unwittingly responsible for facilitating the entry of 13 illegal immigrants).

Did a run northwest from where I'm staying, on the western edge of the central city. (I've scored three out of three on the internet-booking-near-dodgy-street-corner count on this trip, except here the shady characters on the next corner are selling drugs, not sex - once again, though, the hotel is fine as long as you choose your exit direction well).

Lausanne is a hilly city. (It's also a pretty small one - I was in countryside within 3km). My route was sort of along the contour with only one full frontal assault on the slope, but was still always rolling, never really flat. Turned out to be a lovely day for it, cool, sunny and breezy. The run was so-so through the first half but became pretty good later on, especially in the last 10 minutes (despite the pedestrian traffic jams in the central city).

C • Perhaps 1

Zurich was a bit of a shock to the system after spending most of the last couple of weeks in either out-of-season ski resorts or German spa towns whose population average age was lowered considerably by the WMOC crowd - certainly much more lively than anywhere else I've been for a while. Some of the liveliness was perhaps a bit too much for comfort - the corner my hotel was on was also the gathering place for the local prostitutes (now I know why it was cheap by Zurich standards), something they mysteriously neglected to mention on their website (or maybe it came under 'close to local amenities').

Didn't have any real reason to leave town before 11 or so, so thought I might as well do a swim at the Zurich end, which involved a bit of use of Zurich's excellent public transport system. Also a decent swim although calves cramped a bit.

Now in Lausanne. It will get pretty busy from here; as a member of the jury, hopefully sprint qualification will be less eventful than last year was.

C • Zurich Hotel 3

Seefeld, a ski town about 25km from Innsbruck, was the location of the long distance for my first "JWOC" (officially, in those days, the Open European Championships), although the event centre itself was in Kufstein about 70km east. I decided to stay here because I was aiming for a 9.54 train out of Innsbruck but didn't want to stay in Innsbruck itself; it wasn't until yesterday that I realised that this was 23 years to the day since that race.

Those with more recent experience of JWOC may not appreciate how different things were in those days. There were two Australians there (Nicola Plunkett-Cole was the other one). The sum total of the information I had before the event was that I should present myself to the Kufstein railway station on or about 8 July and look for something or somebody that looked like they might have something to do with orienteering. (No point looking for the website - the WWW wasn't invented for another two years). The first Austrian map I saw was the one for the model event. I also had no idea of what to expect competitively, but having had some decent results in British events in the first half of the year hoped that midfield might be possible; however, being as grossly under-prepared as I was, you won't be surprised that it didn't happen, with a 10-minute mistake on #4 and an eventual placing of 71st out of 90-odd.

Today resembled 12 July 1989 in one respect only - the temperature (11 degrees, although without the day-long downpour that there was that day). I went looking for the athletics track which was the finish area - thought I remembered where it was relative to the topography but couldn't find it. (Possibly it's been converted to a soccer field - Seefeld seems to get a lot of big-name summer training camps, with Manchester City in town at present). Not a great run although got going a bit better in the last 10 minutes.

Next move was on to Zurich - partly a staging post en route to Lausanne, partly to catch up with a friend here (although I think her 3-year-old son did more talking than either of us did).

I've been doing a bit of revisiting moments from 1989 on this trip - in July/August 1989 (a year when I was based in England), I did "JWOC" in Austria (more about this in tomorrow's entry), spent the rest of July in Scandinavia, and then August making my way slowly through Germany and Switzerland (with a couple of side trips to neighbouring countries). One of the last stops on this was Klosters, and remembering the run I did from there was enough excuse to pick it as a place to stay this time. (The other place I was considering was St. Moritz, where I'd spent time training in the lead-up to the World Uni Champs in 1994 - as it turned out it was a pity I didn't go there as I got a message the next night that one of the friends I was hoping to catch up in Zurich was in St. Moritz....).

The run itself involves a gradual climb up a side valley from Klosters. The first part of this wasn't as attractive as it was in 1989 - there was a major flash flood here in 2005 and a long stretch of the river had been turned into a building site in a probably forlorn attempt to find an engineering solution to prevent repeat performances. Once past that, though, it became increasingly nice, and towards the far end it became classic Switzerland - high alpine valley, nice morning and background symphony of cowbells. At this stage the run was threatening to catch alight; it never quite did, but was still probably my best of the trip so far.

It turned out the run also saw the day's best weather - no rain (at least until I stopped for the night) but enough cloud to put a dampener on the views. Came back through the west end of Austria, and briefly through a corner of Germany, with three unscheduled deviations. The first and third were due to the inadequacies of Austrian signposting and/or my map. The second was because I was supposed to be doing an international teleconference at 2, started doing it, whereupon two local council workers turned up with a jackhammer and started digging up the road outside, forcing me to relocate to the next phone box (which turned out to be in a town 5km up a side road). Deviations numbers 1 and 2 did mean seeing some attractive places I hadn't planned on, number 3 ended up at a very unattractive factory.

Equalled a personal best with four countries for the day (Switzerland, Liechenstein, Austria and Germany), but four border crossings in a day is a PB (I went from Austria to Germany and back again). Previous four-countries-per-day efforts, both involving long train trips and ferries, were Austria/Germany/Denmark/Sweden (1989) and Czechoslovakia/Germany/Belgium/UK (1991). The second of these I remember best because I was travelling in the company of a British under-15 ice hockey team, and just after crossing into Belgium one of the managers realised that two of them hadn't made the connection in Cologne...

And I noticed that the Austrian tabloids were full of the exploits of the local equivalent of Corey Worthington. I thought having 800 of your closest friends turning up to a party mentioned by someone on Facebook was so 2009.

C • border crossings 3

C • Corey Worthington 2

Spent the night just on the Italian side of the Austrian border, although an indication that this particular bit of territory's status as Italian is fairly nominal came when the person serving at breakfast apologised for speaking to me in Italian because she'd mistaken me for an Italian (the locals themselves are almost entirely German-speaking).

This should have been a very nice place for a run, a high valley at ~1300 metres, but couldn't really get myself going this morning. Did manage to cope with the run's biggest climb OK.

From there, it was a day of admiring how good the cyclists are - going over four passes which would presumably be HCs if they were in France. Cyclists were not in short supply on the highest of these, the Stelvio (nor was cycling-related road graffiti). Neither were motorbikes, although the only sports car I saw was a Slovakian-registered Porsche - maybe Top Gear (who rated this the world's top driving road) aren't as influential as we thought. Ended up in Klosters, Switzerland, a very upmarket ski resort at the right time of year but stone dead in July.

C • Stelvio 3

In Nuremburg for the night en route from Bad Harzburg to points further south - this involved catching up with James Allston (who lives here) the previous evening.

After a bit of early stiffness this turned out to be probably my best (or perhaps least-worst) run of the trip, although the degree of difficulty was not particularly high - a flat out-and-back along the north side of the river to the east of town (a bike route which involves almost no road crossings, a definitely plus at weekday peak hour). Moving reasonably well and saved all my spluttering for the end of the run.

I'm tempted to put my walk at Innsbruck to pick up the hire car as a separate session - it turns out the company has a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of "Innsbruck downtown", plus there doesn't appear to be any way to get out of the east side of Innsbruck station. It took me 45 minutes to walk there (with gear). Did end up getting there eventually, and set off for three days of Alpine exploration (which today included a couple of genuine Alpine thunderstorms and a mountain pass which is a one-lane road that's only open between 00 and 15 minutes past the hour).

C • Innsbruck Car Hire 2

A turning-the-legs-over session around Bad Harzburg which felt reasonable at the start but became a bit of a drag later on. Nice to get onto some of the smaller tracks around the place. Saw the Hoggs on their way down to the station (before getting the next train out myself and encountering various others in the process). Could have done without the news that I might be coming back to a court case.

Still feeling a bit tired, and slept a fair bit on the train. Now in Nurnberg for the night.

C • court case? 4

WMOC long final, which became a bit of a salvage operation once it became clear that a difficult couple of weeks wasn't going to finish in time to be 100% for this race. Was spluttering most of the way through the warm-up and not at all confident about the race, especially with more climb in store than in the earlier races (on the positive side, the early starters were coming back with good things to say about the forest).

Got through the first two cautiously but OK, before a long leg across into the first of the rock. Was caught two minutes going into 3 but that didn't worry me too much, and got smoothly through a technical section as far as 9 apart from one slightly iffy line on 5. Through this section I was bracing myself for the steepest part of the course through 10 and 11. Decided to go over the top on the fearsome-looking 11, reasoning that it was mostly on tracks and didn't involve a lot of extra climb beyond what was already unavoidable (bashing round a steep, rocky slope with yellow areas in a European summer was asking for trouble).

12 was my only mistake of any size, drifting a bit going downhill but picking it up in time to get out of it with 30 seconds or so lost. From there it was a case of plugging away through the remainder of the rocky section to 18. The back was starting to trouble me a bit by now and I was having trouble stretching out, although not as badly as on Thursday. Was unconvincing but steady on the long leg back to 19, and finished off as best I could.

There were no times faster than mine up when I got in but that state of affairs was never going to last for long. Ended up with 20th. I'd have taken that result at the start of the day, but from a longer-term perspective it was pretty disappointing. I'd have needed to be five minutes faster to match my 13th from last year, and that's probably a fair reflection of the difference between the two performances.

Recovery swim at the Bad Harzburg pool, slow and trying to stay out of the way of everyone else. Seemed to do me some good in loosening up but lower back is still tighter than I'd like going into a big race.

Rest day plans were changed a bit because the bus back from the pool was 10 minutes late which meant missing the train to Quedlinberg, so had a bit more of a look around Goslar instead, then headed back home to watch the Tour.

Another long day and didn't have the strength to come up twice in a row, struggling round in a pretty dismal physical effort - needed to be up for this and, without a lot to run for, wasn't.

The course distance (which implied a 5.2 min/km winning time) suggested very fast terrain but even the flat areas weren't super-quick (a bit uneven underfoot and quite a bit of undergrowth in places), and we got into some steeper and greener stuff out the back (as well of some of that much-loved feature of central European terrain in summer, yellow with green stripes) and tracks which were barely visible. Didn't really miss anything, just 15-seconders on 1 and 18, but was plodding throughout, and often worse than that - wasn't able to attack any of the hills, then my lower back muscles decided to go on strike just as the terrain started to open out after 13, leaving me to jog home. (I'm assuming this was fatigue in the soft ground).

Dropped two places which was better than I'd expected - have ended up qualifying 7th in one of three heats, which is a little better than 11th in one of two last year, with worse runs. This ought to give me some grounds for optimism that getting close to last year's 13th is doable if things go well on the day, but I'm not exactly confident about things going well on the day. I've now got 48 hours to get myself right.

WMOC, 1st long qualifier. A much tougher race than I was expecting - heaps of rock and large areas of low-visibility green, without a track network as extensive as one normally expects of central European forests. I wasn't totally caught off guard because the 35s ran early, and it was obvious from their times that we would be at least 10 minutes over.

I'm still coughing and spluttering a fair bit but am getting a little stronger each day. Felt reasonably good in the warm-up, but soft ground and climbing were still hard work - there wasn't a lot of the latter but was plenty of the former. Felt as if I was cruising rather than racing and also felt as if everyone else was going faster than I was (but the results suggest they were either on other courses or making more mistakes). Cautious through the technical sections from 3-7 and 12-15, which included some scary legs into small features in medium green, and also survived the steep slog through 10 and 11. Lost concentration a bit on the last control in the main green area, 16, and dropped a minute or so, also a slight wobble on 20. I'd tired a fair bit by 16, too, but got a bit of a second wind in the last 15 minutes.

Haven't seen full results yet but it looks like I'm 5th on the day, at least five places higher than I would have expected to be with this run. I suspect this is a fairly soft heat. It does give me the luxury of being able to back off a little tomorrow; the major objective is still to get myself into the best shape I can for Saturday, and see what place that gets me. Today suggests that a top-20 result is a reasonable aspiration, especially if I'm healthier by then.

This run did take quite a bit out of me - rather tired when I got back (and lost more fluid than I realised on a mild but humid day).

C • congratulations 2

WMOC long model, doubling as a continental terrain training session of sorts - ideally I would have preferred to do the second part of the operation on a different day but that's not the way things worked out. The main drawback of using a model day for training purposes is that the controls are usually rendered very visible by the crowds milling around them.

The terrain was pretty nice - the white is often very fast with not much on the ground, and even the green isn't too bad (although hard to hold a straight line in, as I discovered when experimenting with a risky route into a clearing). Rock also reasonably clear-cut, although as per usual, the most distinguishing feature of the charcoal burning grounds is the orange and white flag.

Not pushing it too much physically. Felt OK on the flat but not very strong up the big hill - but this hill was bigger than anything I am expecting to see during the competitions (except perhaps in the long final).

WMOC sprint final, 47th. Had a crack and was certainly further advanced and stronger than yesterday, but could only maintain full intensity for six or seven minutes when I needed to last twice that long; drifted out of it at the end, and ended up 20-odd seconds outside the top-half result I would have settled for at the start of the day.

The first control was such a giveaway that not a lot would have been lost by declaring it to be the start triangle, and the second wasn't much harder. It got a bit trickier after that but was nowhere near as technical as I had expected for a medieval town centre (the street pattern was relatively simple, and unlike a lot of German cities, I don't think we can blame His Majesty's Air Force for this).

Flowing smoothly through the first six. Lost 10-15 seconds through carelessly overrunning 7, at around the point where I was starting to flag a bit, and battling a bit from there. Also had an annoying 10-second shoelace stop on the way to 14 - first time for a long time this has happened to me in a big race (perhaps because it was a pair of shoes I don't normally race in).

I'd accepted before today that the sprint this year was not really going to be about the result - I probably needed another 48 hours recovery for that. The best I could hope for was to give myself a bit of a springboard for the rest of the week. Saturday is the main target now.

Good to see Tash and Hermann get medals (I hadn't realised that Goslar is Hermann's former home town).

Went into the town centre for dinner post-event, and saw two blatant OOB violations by open-race competitors....

C • 15-16 3

Event: WMOC 2012
 

This was a day for doing the necessary, which I did - just (although still waiting for official confirmation that I've scraped in - have had enough near-misses before not to take anything for granted).

Significantly improved on yesterday, probably at least in part through sleeping well last night - so well that I failed to notice the thunderstorms which went through at 2am (incidentally, these were predicted to the hour on yr.no 48 hours in advance). Certainly still a long way from being fully fit, something which was particularly noticeable on the only hill, but, after being 20% on Friday and 30% yesterday, I was perhaps 60% today. I won't be 100% tomorrow but hopefully won't be too far away from it.

As expected the course was a mix of town streets and school grounds/parks (some with an impressive control density - walking home I found one spot with eight controls within sight). Lost a bit of time on 2 through misreading some vegetation - maybe 20 seconds or so. Continued to plod on. Yuri Omelchenko caught me two minutes at 7 (and promptly made a small mistake but soon blew past me again). Clean for the rest, although one hairy moment with a head-on collision coming into 17 (no serious damage to either party).

I was a bit surprised it was such a close-run thing - the other heat also ran our course and did it before us, and their cut looks like being almost two minutes slower than ours. On the last results I've seen I'm 35th (37 make it) with four unaccounted for, but the printout time was late enough that I'm fairly certain none of those four can displace me (I expect all four will in fact be DNSs).

Tomorrow should be much more technical. Assuming I have made it through, I'll be almost first starter, but with a course that suits me better and an extra day of recovery I'll be hoping for something a fair bit better tomorrow, and perhaps posting a time for the big guns, of whom our field has a few, to chase. (That said, midfield in the A final would still be a decent result).

And perhaps I should be hoping that history repeats itself from 2009 - I also went into that week sick (although that time the cause was having eaten Australia's northernmost dodgy chook on a pre-event work trip to the Torres Strait Islands), narrowly got through sprint qualifying, and by the end of the week got close to a medal.

C • results 3

Looks like 35th (and a place in the final) is confirmed, ending (at least for now) visions of becoming the first person to narrowly miss a JWOC final, a WOC final and a WMOC final in the same country. (I suspect, but am not sure, that I may be the first person to contest a JWOC, a WOC and a WMOC in the same country - the only other possibility would be someone born in 1972 who did JWOC 1992, WOC 2001 and WMOC 2007 in Finland).

Over the last couple of days I've seen a bit of a WMOC official who is a Lizzie Ingham lookalike. Thought I'd seen her again this afternoon but this one was the real Lizzie (visiting for the day from her current Bremerhaven base). Speaking of lookalikes, is ALJ able to confirm that she wasn't off moonlighting at my climate conference in Edinburgh last week?

C • I wish!! 2