Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

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