Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

In transit (currently at Hong Kong). Highlight so far has been the hapless ground staff for Sterling (a budget Danish airline) at Oslo airport, who in an unusual display of honesty announced to the assembled multitude that they apologised for the delay and had no more idea than the passengers did as to what was going on, and if people wanted to know more they should ring the Sterling office in Copenhagen. (Later they advised that due to staff shortages no bags could be loaded - glad I wasn't on that flight).

The blisters aren't a lot better and I felt stiff in a lot of places where I don't normally feel stiff, which may be an indicator that I was running yesterday with altered form (a good way to do yourself another injury). If today had been a World Cup I'd probably have at least started, but there isn't a lot to run for today at my end of the field (unless you think I could bridge a 62-minute gap to Baptiste Rollier and pick up a few thousand euros) and there didn't seem to be a lot of point slogging around for 90 minutes or so on a hot day. I therefore added my name to what appeared to be the rapidly-expanding 'Ej start' list.

With a bit of luck three days' rest - I'm on a plane from tomorrow lunchtime onwards - will do the trick and I'll be OK to start training again in Melbourne on Monday morning. Having seen the forecast for Melbourne Fitzroy Pool might be a bit too much of a seasonal shock first-up, though (as will the idea of it being dark at times other than between midnight and 3 a.m).

Celebrity-spotting time: last night Anne Margrethe Hausken, Minna Kauppi, Matthias Merz, Anders Nordberg and half the Swedish team were seen in the queue at the pizza place. This may be an indication that some of them are taking today less than seriously too (a few of them have already popped up as fellow members of the 'ej start' club).

This would have been a fabulously enjoyable orienteering experience for most of those involved - after taking a chairlift to the start, most courses spent most of the time running around the top of the mountain above the treeline before descending at the end (and the view from the top of the hordes running across the fells was quite something).

Unfortunately, I wasn't unable to enjoy it because my run was ruined by heel blisters from yesterday. I thought in the warm-up that it might not be too bad at running speed, but it was agony at the first bit of rough ground I hit and didn't get a lot better after that. It was all the more frustrating because of the knowledge of how much fun this would have been on a better day; it's definitely tempting to come back the next time I'm vaguely near the area and have another go. The chances are that this will be my last senior international appearance for Australia, and it's disappointing to go out on such a painful note.

I lost about a minute apiece at two controls. On 2 it was mostly route choice, going across a gully which I would have been better off going around. Csaba Gosswein, whose relay second leg for Hungary was arguably the 'unsung hero' performance of WOC, went through me there but there was no way I could even think about staying with him. (There was a punk band in my year of school called the Csabai Testicles - named after a brand of salami). I also went underneath 7 on a vague slope. Ended up beating more people (8) than I did on either of the other two days, despite this being my worst run - this may reflect the fact that people who have made big mistakes are more likely to pull the pin in a long distance than they are in a middle. (My junior apartment-mates seemed quite excited by the fact that I beat Johan Runesson, although it would be more accurate to say that Johan beat himself).

Unless my heels improve a lot overnight, I can't see myself going out tomorrow.

Someone's brought along a copy of a 'newspaper' from the Vuokatti region of Finland (bidding for WOC 2013), in which Hanny demonstrates a strong command of the fine art of telling journalists what they want to hear by saying how much she likes the idea of orienteering in northern Finland. Another piece in the same paper starts off:

"Scottish chefs and chef students accustomed to exotic food products do not share the views of the British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay concerning traditional Finnish cooking".

I'm not sure exactly what Gordon Ramsay had to say about Finnish cooking, but one can safely assume it wasn't very complimentary and probably had a lot of "fuck"s in it. Not sure if I'd pay too much attention to Scottish chefs in this regard when the country's best-known items of food are the haggis and the deep-fried Mars Bar.

C • well fark 1

If this had been a 12km course it would have been a very solid run, but in the end the distance defeated me. Even at my peak I haven't had a lot of chances to run a genuine long race against the best in the world, as I rarely survived qualifying. There's no qualifying this week so it was a good opportunity to challenge myself against the best, and I'm not regretting taking the World Cup on even though my result was poor (6 from the bottom in the end) and I'm pretty exhausted now.

The day had some minor misadventures early on. I got woken up by a spam SMS from Optus at 5 and couldn't get back to sleep, and then didn't realise the bus stop for today was different to yesterday's and there was a 20-minute walk I hadn't counted on. This meant a bit less preparation time at the event site than I would have liked but it was fine by the end of the warm-up.

After the long first leg, the first half of the course was largely above the treeline, although with a couple of tricky butterfly loops in a semi-forested complex set of gullies. I missed 1 very slightly but then got going nicely. By the start of the butterfly, about 40 minutes in, I'd been caught 8 minutes by a Norwegian and 2 by Mike Smith, and had caught 4 on an Estonian. Mike showed me into 6 where I was lacking confidence before easing away. I got through the long legs off the mountain, potentially perilous, without any time loss, and was still travelling well at the start of the second butterfly, in a bunch 6 minutes up on a Spaniard and 4 down on a Latvian.

I started to cramp a bit at this stage - and had been annoyed by heel blisters most of the way. I then missed two in a row on a short butterfly loop, 16 slightly and 17 badly (3 minutes), and started to cramp seriously on the climb into 18. That eased for the second butterfly loop, but I made an annoying miss 100m wide of the road crossing, and then hit the wall in a big way. From there it was a survival battle for the last 3k, walking on anything that remotely resembled a hill and jogging (most of) the rest - at least I didn't lose any more time to errors.

Not surprisingly I've been pretty exhausted for the rest of the day, although with none of the muscle soreness that followed the marathon - which is just as well as we race again tomorrow (However, for the first couple of hours I couldn't so much as yawn without setting off a cramp somewhere). I would have hoped to last the distance better than this - at two-thirds distance I was on track for something close to 2.00 which I would have been reasonably satisfied with. Obviously going for 2 or 2 1/2 hours on hard ground doesn't prepare you for a 2-hour race in this; it may also count for something that I haven't done anything over 100 minutes since Jukola.

One hoodoo which has been broken is that of O-Ringen Tuesdays. I have run four previous O-Ringen events and on all of them my Tuesday performance has been catastrophic. (Even if it was converted to a second-day hoodoo, today was disappointing but not disastrous).

Not sure if he's logging at the moment or not, but you can substitute Julian's name for mine in several of the preceding paragraphs and you'd have a pretty good description of his run too (but he was faster in the first two-thirds than I was).

C • Good survival strength 1

Wouldn't normally bother to log this but thought it might be of interest. The notes on mountain orienteering for O-ringen included something to the effect of 'ask your club's M/W60s how to pace-count' (there are a lot of straight slopes with very few features). After reading that I thought I'd better go out on the model map and check what mine was (answer - 50-55/100 metres).

It seems a bit strange to be feeling good about coming 79th in a field of 82 (especially when I was sitting in the bus back next to Daniel Hubmann, who finished about 40 places higher and was utterly disgusted - he almost missed 7 and only turned back when he heard the commentary), but I really enjoyed this race, both the experience and the result. I know I'm going to be close to the bottom this week (although I would have liked to have picked off a few of the North Americans, Japanese and Kiwis who were in the minute or so ahead of me), but the main goal is not to be hopelessly uncompetitive as I was in Norway, and I think I more or less achieved this.

We started high on a ski slope (large parts of the race were visible from the arena). I didn't take a great route to 1 and was a bit tentative on the steep descent into the control - something which might bite me a bit more on the next two days. I then felt like I was running fairly well but was a little disconcerted when the Japanese runner (quick but erratic) caught me a minute between 4 and 5. I then settled quite nicely, doing the forest stretch well; took an unnecessarily difficult line across the half-pipe into 7, then stretched out on the second half through the scattered ski cabins. Missed 11 by a few seconds. In the last few controls it was apparent that Mattias Karlsson, who started 4 minutes behind me, was on a very good time because the commentators kept talking about how good a time he was on. My goal then became to hold him off, which I did - just. (They then kept talking about his strong finish - must have been because he had something to chase :-)

This was a really enjoyable experience, a return to the big time in a way that Norway wasn't. There were several thousand people watching (and I got the full wall of sound in the finish because Mattias was coming in just behind), and plenty of support from the people in and around the ski cabins too - to say nothing of the autograph-hunters at the exit from the finish. I was on a high for a while after this and felt terrific on the warm-down; hopefully I can take this into tomorrow.

Event: Oringen 2008
 

A lot of travelling today which made it a good day to schedule a rest day, although I woke up early enough that I would have had time to squeeze something in had I still been looking to maintain a multi-year streak. The sequence was Olomouc to Prague by train (very nice, although that was partly because I'd booked a first-class ticket by mistake when I thought the ticket clerk was asking me whether I wanted a one-way or return), Prague to Oslo by plane (fairly painless, although the luggage took forever to arrive, and my quest for a watch continues because of the 82 shops that Prague airport boasts about, 80 of them appear to sell exactly the same items - grog, cigarettes, perfume and sometimes chocolate), and Oslo to Salen by bus (also fairly painless, except for the reminder at the food stop as to how expensive Norway is).

The WOC results were probably at or slightly above expectations - the relays were around where I thought we'd be but I didn't think we'd get any individual results quite as good as 14th. (Kathryn probably got some help from running with Liisa Anttila, but as someone has done an analysis which has found that 60% of the women's field spent significant time in packs she was hardly alone in that). The women will be even more formidable next year if we get Hanny back, but the same can't be said for the men - there is a steep drop from the top three to the rest and the word is that some, perhaps even all, of those three won't be fronting next year. (Take out the top three from this year and you'd be left with a team which looked something like Kerrin, William, Matt and Reuben - probably capable of getting in or close to the top 20 in the relay, but any individual final appearance would be a bonus).

One of the more dramatic days that I can recall in orienteering - it's definitely not every relay which has three lead changes in the last five controls, and the leader at the start of that section departing the vicinity of the last control, not in the company of triumphant flag-waving teammates, but in the back of a helicopter. (As I've noted on the WOC thread, Thierry appears to have recovered very quickly indeed and I think he's probably still going to race this week).

As often on such days my own run was a relatively minor consideration after this - just a quick session around the streets of Olomouc sandwiched between return and WOC banquet. It ended up being my best run of the week - the first time since Monday when running hasn't seemed like a chore, especially in the second half, much of which was spent on a dirt path along one of the rivers. Of the occasional local hazards of dogs and drunks, I saw one of each but both were harmless.