Training Log Archive: Kat

This was all the warm-up I could manage - still feeling dead.

EVENT: Måsenstafetten 2008
TEAM: Linne's 3rd team: Kat, Becka, Elin
COURSE: 5.88 km, 12 controls
MAP: Buskhyttan, 1:10,000, 4m contours
TERRAIN: Very technical, with short, steep hills. Absolutely gorgeous woods, but very difficult!
MY RUN: Disaster. In retrospect, it would have been best for me to not have run today, but I just couldn't pass up the chance to orienteer in this amazing terrain. So, despite my tiredness, swollen left knee, and empty head, I was excited to go out on the first leg. But already to the first control I wound up with the wrong group of girls and spent some time relocating to get to my control. The hills seemed much bigger than I thought they would be and I kept stopping early (a combination of moving slower than usual and having orienteered at 1:1250 scale yesterday). I made an amazing mistake on #7. It was a long leg, and I left the trail one junction too early, making a parallel error. I then went on to relocate for about half an hour before realizing what had happened and going to the control. It's pretty funny, actually. My split for this control was 38:45. Sofie's was 6:50. I have not felt so utterly and completely lost in a long time. To my credit, I stayed positive and kept trying to relocate despite the overwhelming desire to lie down and go to sleep.
RESULTS: 72nd/73 women on the first leg. Quickroute. (All those loops in the middle of the map are actually part of my route to #7.)

Jogged the second leg of the Varsity Match relay around Norby. Fun stuff!

Walked around part of the DX Deluxe course in the afternoon. Thought about jogging, but was too tired. Absolutely shattered after the last few days of helping out with the Varsity Match and racing full-out on Friday. Whatever strength I had managed to recover by then was used up in those 69 minutes...

Warming up along the big trail and then jogging to the start.

EVENT: Oxford-Cambridge Varsity Match 2008
COURSE: Women's A, 6.73 km, 17 controls
MAP: Norra Lunsen, 1:10,000, 2.5m contours
TERRAIN: Gorgeous, typical Lunsen. Technically difficult, and this time covered in snow to make things physically challenging as well.
MY RUN: At a glance, it was terrible. I lost 12+ minutes out on the course. But when I looked at exactly where and why this happened, this made sense. I lost time on #1 because I made a type of parallel error because the yellow marsh I saw in reality was covered by the pink line on the map. Then on #2 (the long leg), I navigated just fine to the rock, but then spent several minutes trying to relocate before reading my control descriptions and realizing that the control was not on the rock, but on top of the hill next to it. A similar thing happened with #10, when I thought the center of the circle was on the tip of a big marsh, but actually it was on a small marsh on top of a nearby hill. Again, I navigated just fine to the big marsh and was then confused when I did not see the control. The most annoying was losing 1:35 on the last control (an obvious hill) because the flag had been knocked down to the ground and I couldn't see it. There were streamers leading from there to the finish, so I knew I was in the right place, but this didn't help me see the flag any quicker!!!
So, even though I lost tons of time, at least I know that the big losses were because of things like not seeing the map properly or not reading the control descriptions rather than because of faulty navigation. Lesson learned - in the future, I must be extra careful in the control circle.
RESULTS: 3rd on Women's A. Helen was 1st (59:24), Anne second (65:00). Oxford won easily. Results here

C • cool! well done! 3

Easy run with Csaba (once around the Norby lit track, then off to circuits). Quads felt better and knees weren't hurting so much, which is great. Still not feeling 100%, but hopefully if I keep allowing my body to recover in between trainings, I'll begin to feel fast and strong again in a couple of weeks.

OK Linne circuits, with all of the leg exercises substituted with crunches.

Running home.

Short course on Lunsen, again from Plantskolan. Boris shadowed me for the first three controls, then I did the remaining five on my own. In general, I was completely in control of the navigation. I made only one mistake and (partly thanks to Boris) fixed it before it became anything big. The snow made running difficult at times, especially in the marshes. Tiring!

Wednesday night-O on Åland. I was doing really well through the 7th control (not fast because there was lots of snow, but technically ok). Then half-way to #8 I realized that I'd lost my compass. So I tried going back to find it, failed, then tried to continue the course, but this leg happened to cut across a field which happened to have man-made stuff on it that wasn't mapped, so I was confused and decided to just go to the finish. Then Måns volunteered to go back out with me to search for my compass and together we retraced my steps from #7 (where I last remember looking at it) to the field. Amazingly, we found it! So now I know to put a string on my compass as well as my SI...

A bit of running before the start and later running around trying to find my compass.

Went out on Lunsen (Plantskolan) and hung out controls for the OUOC-CUOC training tomorrow. Since my legs still feel very tired (and because I think map-hiking is very good training), I decided to walk instead of run. So I drew controls for myself in between the ones I had to hang (26 short legs in total). The snow in the woods was enough to slow me down, but the weather was reasonably warm today, so there is hope of some of it melting by Friday. About half of the marshes were frozen over, but few were solid enough to walk on without breaking.

Comments about last weekend: Overall, it was a very disappointing trip. It took about 8 hours to drive down there to the south of Sweden, and I was expecting warm, nice weather and some fun technical races. Instead, it snowed non-stop for the first three days, so that there was first wet slush on the ground, and later ice. The event centers became huge mud fields, impossible to cross without getting your socks wet. The relay courses were good, but the weather was so bad that day that it was quite depressing to be outside. The qualification sprint race was nothing more than a runner's course. The middle distance was very well-planned and would have been extremely fun, again had it not been for the snow in the woods.

So for the last four days, I have been cold most of the time and unhappy half of the time. I have not had a warm shower since last Wednedsay and, perhaps the worst of all, I missed out on the chance to run well at the JK in favour of this weekend! Of course, when I made my decision, I could not have guessed that a storm would come, but I cannot help regretting it a bit anyway. But what's done is done. Time to recover and start thinking ahead.

C • Cold 2

Core, push-ups, dips, and some stretching.