Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Had originally had thoughts before the start of this weekend of doing something at some stage on the map which Jim's family property is located on (haven't had the chance on my two previous visits, one because it was winter, one because we were passing through after a tough World Cup and I was carrying an injury anyway). The logistics didn't work out, though (and Jim was coming off the Norwegian ultralong champs yesterday - not sure if the map is online but if so the first leg is worth a look) so instead this was another run from the town in Kongsvinger, this time a couple of kilometres of grinding up the hill to the south of town, then across the top as far as a lake. Fairly hard work (and slow) up the hill but not painful; once on top a steady run without much sparkle.

That then set things up for the rest of the day's festivities in Lunderseter, the old home village, where the extended families - one of Esten's cousins was also being christened today - was a very different crowd to the usual Sunday morning in the local church (what I took to be the normal congregation, up the back, numbered in single figures, all of them north of 60). I'm sure some deep and meaningful words were spoken but I couldn't understand many of them. Definitely a significant celebration, though, and the first time for a while that I've had the chance to meet up with most of the Norwegian side of the family, of whom there are plenty (Jim is one of five siblings, and his older sister has four children).

The post-event lunch was then in the hall of Lunderseter IL (the local sports club), which could easily have been its Australian country equivalent except that about two-thirds of the trophies and plaques on display related to orienteering, with the winning team from the relay at the 1956 Norwegian Championships (and the map from same - a rogaine-standard 1:25000) having pride of place. One interesting feature was that the relay changeovers weren't at the start/finish - I wonder how long this was standard practice? It must once have been a much larger place than it is now - these days it's just a collection of houses strung out along the road, population probably struggling to reach three figures. The most recent loot on display was from O-Festival in 1991, which I remember well as my first attempt at Norwegian orienteering (successful beyond any expectations on the first two days, then got overwhelmed by starting third, between two podium finishers from that year's JWOC, in the chasing start and blew up on the last day; with hindsight, part of the reason why the first two days went well was that the terrain was atypical for Norway).

C • Norwegian Ultralong 2

C • Weather 7

Spending time in the hot waters of the Blue Lagoon was a nice experience and also seems to have done my back some good, but there was one consequence I didn't think about - you lose a lot of fluids when you spend significant periods in 40-degree water, and I was sufficiently dehydrated to need to get up to drink water twice during the night. This contributed to an atrocious night's sleep.

It proved to be a drawn-out travelling day - the plane was supposed to be leaving at 7.50 and I was at the airport by 6, but got the word there that it was delayed, with a rescheduled time of 10.10. It ended up being another hour later than that because the scanners at the gate failed and everybody's details had to be entered manually. With the time difference, it was nearly 4 by the time I got into Oslo, over three hours late.

With the afternoon disappeared, once we'd arrived in Kongsvinger and checked out our not-big-enough-to-swing-a-cat room, I decided to head out as soon as I could. I expected to feel awful and the first couple of kilometres weren't great, but once that was out of the way it wasn't too bad - mostly on a track along the river which I guess turns into a ski track in winter. Back was OK. Went past Kongsvinger's weather station - they can't have vandals in Norway because there was no fence of any kind around it (ditto for Iceland).

After some of the swimming pools described in earlier sections it seemed a pity to do my weekly proper swim session in a reasonably conventional Reykjavik pool. The one clear bit of evidence that one was in Iceland were the several outdoor hot tubs alongside the pool. Apparently quite a bit of Iceland's business is transacted in these hot tubs (I was reading an account of someone who got their money out of the Icelandic banks in the nick of time in 2008 on the advice of somebody they met in the hot tub). A slow and slightly awkward-feeling swim on a drizzly morning. Back wasn't great today and I was glad I wasn't running (although sometimes when it feels bad walking it's OK running).

The swimming pool had a sign for karate, which grabbed my attention by being one of very few familiar words on a sign. Icelandic is closely related to the other Nordic languages (apart from Finnish) and if you know a reasonable number of Norwegian words you'll recognise a lot of Icelandic ones, but Iceland has been diligent in devising local words rather than importing new foreign words, so words (or recognisable variations thereof) which are found in most European languages, like "telephone", "bus" and 'police", look very different here. However, some graffiti demonstrated that a certain word beginning with F which exists in every other European language is also found in Icelandic.

Reykjavik, like a lot of places, is not flattered by its entrances/exits (various monuments to the boom, and more DFO/Bunnings equivalents than I would have thought a city of 200,000 could possibly support), but once out of town there were plenty of interesting sights to be seen. This is very much on the tourist track, but only at Geysir (with its geyser performing every few minutes) did the tour-bus crowds even approach the overwhelming. The attractions were also a set where it didn't matter that the weather was a bit patchy. I even almost broke a long-standing rule of not buying anything in a souvenir shop attached to a tourist attraction - the 2000-piece map-of-Iceland jigsaw was seriously tempting....

(Over lunch I saw another map of Iceland on the wall, a road map from 1990. In 1990 there was barely a paved road in the eastern half of the country except in the immediate vicinity of the towns, and even the main road between Reykjavik and Akureyri had unpaved sections - although the map wasn't at a large enough scale to determine whether there were any unbridged rivers).

Finished the day with the climax of the tourist-itinerary day - a session at the Blue Lagoon thermal pool (although I passed up the silica mud facial treatments and the in-pool bar).

C • Lögreglan 2

Had thought of doing something en route today but there didn't seem to be any particularly obvious destinations for it (as in, something 10km or so off the main road that wouldn't be easily accessible by vehicle but wasn't totally mountain-goat stuff), and the weather had the potential to get nasty, so decided on another up-the-valley-that-extends-from-the-head-of-the-fjord run, longer this time. This valley (its floor at least) was reasonably agricultural (at one point the local cows decided to run alongside me for a few hundred metres, on the other side of a fence), with the slight oddity of a golf course - surprisingly numerous in Iceland - in its upper reaches. The cloud was a bit low for really expansive views but still plenty to be seen.

The actual running route, gently undulating through farmland (getting a bit steeper at the far end), was a bit reminiscent of Warwick at the end of June, and the run was a bit reminiscent of it too, although not as good. Still, after early niggles worked their way out, it was a run I was enjoying for long stretches. Starting to feel like I was hanging on a bit in the last third with a few areas of muscle fatigue, although the 19th kilometre was the fastest of the day so there can't have been too much wrong.

Today's theme could have been tunnels - five of them amounting to 25km or so, the first four around the mountainous coastline. The first was the most hair-raising (3km of single lane with occasional passing places), and the next two (completed in 2010) were testimony to Iceland's decision to bail out its people rather than its banks - which seems to have worked but a country any larger probably couldn't have got away with it. Later in the day was probably the least spectacular section of the trip, back to Reykjavik, so it wasn't such a bad thing that this section also had the first serious rain of the week (which just added to the atmosphere of bleakness crossing the fells).

One Icelandic feature is the vast number of swimming pools (all geothermally heated) - almost every settlement with a population bigger than a couple of hundred seems to have one. Today I saw a particularly spectacular one at Hofsos, right on a coastal point and looking as if it almost fell away into the sea. Not sure I'd fancy it so much in February at minus 4 and a snow-laden northerly coming in off the Arctic Ocean, but maybe if it was accompanied by the spectacle in the bottom photo of this set it wouldn't matter how cold it was. Seeing an impressive-looking church dated 1960 in those parts also reminded me that you don't see many historic buildings here - with no usable timber, houses were built with stone, turf and whatever else could be scavenged until around 1900. (You don't see many historic buildings in the Norwegian or Finnish Arctic either, but that's because the Nazis burned them all - hoping to deprive the advancing Allies of shelter - as they retreated in 1944).

C • Iceland Topography 4

As mooted last night, a morning run up the road which runs up the valley from the head of the fjord, past the airstrip (no doubt a lifeline here in winter) and what's become a familiar sight, the 'Malbik Endar' sign which marks the end of the bitumen (although on Highway 1 the 'Gravel Road Ahead' signs are at least five times the size of the ones in Icelandic). The fohn wind was in, making it quite warm (around 16-17, in a country where it's by no means unusual for places to go through the whole year without reaching 20), and it was fairly hard work to push into during the first half. I thought it might be a run which caught alight on turning around, with a slight downhill as well, but it didn't really happen - in fact I was fading in the last kilometre or two. Going out before breakfast may have counted for something, and I don't think I've been drinking enough either.

Fairly cosmopolitan crowd at breakfast, including a couple of Texans (I'm struggling to imagine too many places which are less like Texas). The main tourist attraction seems to be walking - there are numerous good day and multi-day walks from here. It's not really on the backpacker circuit, probably because of its remoteness from any form of public transport.

The morning was then spent on the road. Apparently, back in the day, the done thing before traversing the scree slope mentioned yesterday was to make an offering to the relevant gods (there's a monument to that effect). I'm not sure if anyone still does this; the last I heard of Viking traditions carrying through to modern times was in the early 2000s when supporters of Tromso's football team sacrificed a goat on the pitch before the last home game of the season in the hope it would save their team from relegation - it didn't. (Presumably sacrificing virgins is illegal these days in both Iceland and Norway). Took some back roads to get out to the highway, with one hair-raising moment in a section which was being rebuilt (i.e. big rocks everywhere) and a truck came in the opposite direction which could have thrown up who-knows-what, but this truck driver clearly didn't come from the I'm-bigger-than-you-so-get-out-of-the-f***ing-way school and we edged past each other at 20. After that it was up onto the plateau, a place of surreal bleakness - on the higher parts there isn't even any grass. It's a long way from anywhere (there was a 'next petrol 268' sign, albeit on a side road which also had a sign warning of unbridged rivers), so it was a bit of a surprise to see a group of four runners going along the highway, one of them pushing a stroller. (I went past too quickly to determine whether the stroller was being used as a conveyance for a small child, for supplies or both).

That set things up for the main features of the day - Europe's largest waterfall (by volume) at Dettifoss, then the volcanic areas around Myvatn - lots of bubbling mud pools and steaming vents, a crater lake, old lava flow formations which would be amazing on a map, and not-so-old lava flows (there was a big one which lasted intermittently from 1977 to 1984). The actual features will, mostly, be familiar to those who've been to Rotorua but the tourist infrastructure's much lower-key here, just walking tracks and ropes in places where it's a good idea to stay behind them unless you fancy falling into boiling mud.

After encountering my first traffic light for three days in Akureyri, Iceland's second-largest city (a relative term - its population is 17,000 and it took me five minutes to drive through it), I've ended up at Dalvik, about 40km to the north. It's a fishing town and appears to be totally off the tourist track, although perhaps not last week when the annual fishing festival was in town. The landscape leaves you in no doubt that you're in the sub-Arctic; even in the height of summer, there are snow patches down as low as 200 metres in sheltered areas, and fairly solid cover above 600.

Saw a car with Faeroe Islands number plates - and then a second, and then a third. (It was at this point that I remembered that the weekly ferry from a port in eastern Iceland to Scandinavia via the Faeroes leaves on Thursday morning). Among other things, the Faeroes gave us one of those classic British tabloid headlines, 'Faeroes 1 Fairies 1' after Scotland made a mess of what should have been a straightforward World Cup qualifier (others in the same genre, both referring to English misfortunes, include 'Swedes 2 Turnips 1' and 'Yanks 3 Planks 1').

C • Terrain 4

New uses for modern technology: the cooking instructions for the packet of stuff I'd bought for tonight were in a number of languages (although not English or, oddly enough, Icelandic), so I put the Swedish instructions into Google Translate. Maybe the translation wasn't that good because it didn't work that well.

An intervals session on the Hofn waterfront, 10x1 minute. There's a certain purity about doing a session like this on a windswept shoreline (although it could have been a lot more windswept than it was today). The views across the fjord to the glaciers weren't exactly bad either.

The rest of today was mostly about fjords, making my way around the east coast of the country - a bit more settlement than the south coast but still very sparsely populated (and what population there is mostly clings to the coast until you get to Egilsstadir). It's sufficiently out of the way that even a few stretches of Highway 1 are gravel (fortunately Icelandic car rental companies aren't as anal about this as those in some other countries, recognising that it is impossible to circle the country 100% on bitumen - and it also means the Swiss and German 4WDs actually get the chance to go off bitumen for the first time in their lives). In the afternoon the towns got a bit larger (i.e. some of them had populations reaching four figures), some of it associated with an aluminium smelter which I gather was controversial at the time, but if you're going to smelt aluminium anywhere I can think of worse places to do it than regions with abundant hydroelectric and geothermal energy. (The towns haven't moved too far up the sophistication ladder, though - I was looking in an outdoor shop in one of them for some suitably good Icelandic gear for my father, whose birthday is tomorrow, but most of the stock seemed to be guns or accessories for same. Didn't look to see if reindeer-shooting DVDs occupied a prominent place in the local video shop).

My original thoughts involved staying in Egilsstadir but such places as can be booked online were booked out when I checked this morning, so I decided to go for something more remote and have ended up at Borgarfjordur - at the end of a 70km road from Egilsstadir, much of it gravel and involving a steep mountain pass and a section across a scree slope which feels like it could disappear into the ocean at any moment. It has a real end-of-the-line feeling (although that must be true several times over in winter) and definitely feels like my sort of place much more than Egilsstadir would have - the latter being a nondescript inland town whose main distinction is that it has more "forest" around it than anywhere else in Iceland (let's not get too excited here - a tree more than 5 metres tall is still a rarity).

Back was fine running today but wasn't great in the last couple of hours of driving (which simply gave me an excuse for more photo stops).

Warm-up and down. As always these days, grinding the gears in the first kilometre.

It occurred to me, being in southeast Iceland, that 'Southeast Iceland' is a name I associated mostly with a year of waking up to the BBC shipping forecast on the radio just before 6am. Those who know the lingo won't be surprised to hear that 'gale 8', 'severe gale 9', 'storm 10' and occasionally 'violent storm 11' were regular features. I'd say today was probably 4-5.

(I'm assuming it didn't survive the 2003 fires, but if it did, the April 1986 part of the logbook at the Rendezvous Creek hut contains a number of entries from fellow members of my Year 10 camp group taking the mickey out of something I'd said on the subject of what force the wind was).

C • Iceland 1

The first of what will probably be a few 'tourist runs' this week, from the Skaftafell visitors center at the Vatnajokull National Park, near the endpoint of a couple of glaciers which originate from the Vatnajokull icecap. I'd actually intended to take a flattish route up one of the valleys but one of the signs was a bit misleading, and by the time I realised that the path was a proper climb and not just getting above the valley floor to avoid some obstacle or other, I was reasonably committed. It was definitely worth the work, though - some very nice waterfalls and great views from the top (on a day when great views weren't in short supply). Most of the climbing was done in the first 2km and from there the run became steadily better, although not as good as an alleged split of 3.08 for the 6th kilometre suggests - I've adjusted the distance estimate. (I think the last time I ran a 3.08 kilometre anywhere was probably the last kilometre of my Tan PB in 1997). Not for the last time this week, there were quite a few photo stops.

This was part of a long day - wanting to make the best of today's good weather on the day when it matters most from the scenery point of view (after today it's less about high mountains and more about fjords and waterfalls, or so I'm led to believe), plus the southern coast of Iceland is very sparsely populated - strangely, people don't want to live in places where a volcano or associated phenomena might wipe them out at any moment - and there is a stretch of over 200km between towns, so I pushed on later than I might otherwise have done. (It's a novelty in Europe to see a road sign which has only three-digit numbers on it). As you would expect the scenery is stunning - a few lunar landscapes and lava plains to start, then later on mountains and glaciers - I think I saw at least 20 glaciers from the road, the best of them being the one which calves into an iceberg-filled coastal lagoon. Only negative was that most of the mountain tops were in cloud, so I haven't got any pictures of the Eyjafjallajokull summit to show off to our volcanic ash forecasting guru...T

Finished the day up in Hofn, a slightly-rough-around-the-edges fishing town whose population of 1600 or thereabouts makes it very much the regional centre (as far as I can tell, there's no town with a population exceeding 2500 in the entire eastern half of Iceland). Today was very much on the tourist track, from here on it will mostly be a bit less so.