Training Log Archive: BorisGr

Snow soccer! A fun game of slipping and sliding and scoring lots of goals (final score 28-17) after working on the data mining assignment with Christoph.

Another installment of Bjorn's Wednesday Night-O, this one in Vedyxa in several inches of snow. Went much better than last wendesday's though i still made close to ten minutes of mistakes, but at least i was never totally lost and actually had a few good legs through pretty techinical terrain. Oh yeah, the last two nights i ran with the neoprene socks on for the first time. They are awesome!!!! Highly recommend these.

C • socks 1

To and from school, in the snow.

Tuesday night training with the club, my first run in real snow here. Did the 13km version of the run, the extra distance is from the warmup loop and running to and from the clubhouse. This was a more brutal line-O than two weeks ago, with some portions of actual control-finding thrown in, as well as forking and bits of particularly nasty terrain.At one point, one guy we were running with 'found' the control, which was the corner of a swamp by ending up waste-deep in the swamp; and Lars and i took nosedives into the snow almost at the same time fighting through some green. I am still amazed by how well some of these guys navigate - be it day or night. Even just following along on the map is difficult in some places. I was (and am) absolutely wiped out after the run and am having trouble keeping my eyes open. I think the last time i was s physically tired after a workout may have been a ski race or a billygoat or something.

An afternoon run in the snow on the lit path in Stadsskogen. Really pretty - snowy trees, fresh snow, no people at all, and some confused bunnies running out on the trail once in a while. Fun run!

C • 2

Monday gympa class with Lars, Mats, Jan, and company. Lars also just started going last week, so we lend each other some moral support in our lack of coordination...

Easy run with my friend Tim in Stadsskogen. It felt nice having an easy weekend, and i feel recharged for a new week of training.

C • ... 3

My friend Tim is visiting from New York! I had to take him to try out Gympa! It was fun, though maybe three of these per week is a bit too much...
And, i have my skis now!!

C • 2

Running to and from Hagadalensskolan, warm-up and jogging between intervals.

Running school!
(Various running form exercises, led by Sofie.)

C • Running school! 1

Night-O intervals in Stadsskogen, set by Kalle. We broke up intro groups of 3 and 4 and did intervals. There were 6 loops, each of them forked, so we were racing side by side, but not always going to the same controls. The courses were set so that most of each leg was on the trail, but you needed to attack off the trail precisely and not lost time in the woods or coming back to the trail. It was really fun - maybe the most fun i've ever had doing intervals! Felt pretty strong the whole way, but made a couple of small mistakes, allowing Lars to get away from me on the last loop. We rested 1:30-1:50 between the loops.
Splits:
4:29 - ~800m
4:30 - ~800m
4:54 - ~800m (about 30 sec lost)
5:33 - ~1000m
3:49 - ~600m
4:28 - ~800m (about 15 sec lost)

Circuit training with the club after the intervals. After feeling great during the intervals, was pretty sluggish during the circuits. It's been a long week with some excellent training (perhaps my first 100km running week). A day off tomorrow, I think.

C • 1

It takes a special kind of person to run full speed through the woods, looking for small orange-and-white flags. It takes an even more special kind of person to do this at night when the temperature is below freezing. It takes a complete imbecile to run full-speed into a swamp unambiguously labeled on the map The Cow Killer.

In other words, today was a step back after those two steps forward I thought I took in my night-O last week. After carefully reading Mats' advice in my comments, I did the opposite at the start and took off at full speed in the wrong direction and with no plan of attack. Not surprisingly, I messed up the first control, as did just about everyone else. I followed this with an excellent plan to 2 that I was executing well, running on a trail and passing some old people, when the old people turned off to the left and I decided "Well, they are old and Swedish. They must know what they are doing" and followed them, chaning my plan on the fly. Sure enough, seconds later, I was stuck in the green, cursing and yelling right next to the old Swedes, who were yelling at each other for picking such a bad route choice. That was control number 2. On 3, I ended up in the middle of the Cow Killer, knee-deep in ice-cold water and starting to panic. I got out and found the control and actually began orienteering ok after this, but I had porbably lost at least 12 minutes by then! I noticed that one big difference between what I do at night and during the day is that I have so little confidence in my night-O skills that I begin to panic and act irrationally when I am not totally sure where I am at night. Granted, it's harder to regain map contact once you lose it at night, but it is possible (except at Lunsen), and I need to remain more calm and focused, like I usually manage during the day.
Well, anybody want to tell me what the moral of this story is? (Creativity gets bonus points here.)

Running to meet up with Jan, Joffe, Micke, and Sofie at Blodstensvagen and then to Stenhagen for the night-O.

C • 7

Running home from Stenhagen. Almost sprinting towards the end to try to get warm. Now I know why people in the club weren't too excited to orienteer on this rarely-used map that is just a 20-minute job away from home: it was just about the worst terrain I have seen in Uppsala so far, and Mats Troeng crossed the finish line tonight and immediately said "Never again".

C • 2

To/from school

Running to the clubhouse, to the start of backbana, back home from backbana very tired.

Backbana with the club. Everyone started slowly for some reason, and I found myself at the end of a big pack of slower runners, with little room to pass. I gradually worked my way to one of the front packs, which was also running slowly. After a while, I started picking up speed and caught the leader, Ulf Troeng (yes, the 'baby' of the Troeng family - only ranked like 56th in Sweden...) and ran with him, both of us gradually picking up the pace. We were running very hard over the last few km, and he blew past me on the final steep downhill and I made up no ground on the road or the final uphill, where I had to run as hard as I could with Mats Troeng closing the gap from behind in a hurry! In the end, the time is not impressive due to the slow start, but we were working very hard over the second half of the course.
Final exam in my Knowledge-Based Systems course tomorrow...

C • 3

An afternoon trail run on Nasten. Was overly optimistic in not wearing anything thicker than o-pants on my legs and froze pretty well by the end. On the bright side, I only heard a couple of gunshots in the woods (i doubt anyone would mistake me for a moose in a USA Orienteering jacket) and only fell through the ice into ankle-deep marsh water four times.

C • ... 7

Intensivegympa at the Ekeby gym, right around the corner from my house. This is the intensive aerobics stuff that Mattias Berggrund got Kenny and me to try in Stockholm a long, long time ago. I thought it was funny then, and I think it's funny now. But it is a good workout and, when you see the #1-ranked orienteer in the world hopping along to music, somehow it makes you feel less stupid for doing it yourself. Definitely more fun with a group of people you know (though surrounded by dozens of swedish chicks in tights does have its appeal.) :)

Hi Kat!!!

C • 10

Day 2 of OK Linne's fall camp. Sunday consisted of waking up, eating breakfast, having a short follow-up meeting to Saturday night's discussions (where the club's ambitious goals were stated. These included: being a club for everyone, from kids to veterans, from beginners to elites; having the best men's and women's relay teams in sweden; getting more club members involved in organizing activities; being more visible in the media; and the most impressive one of all: making orienteering the number 1 sport in Uppsala!)
After the meeting, we cleaned the cabins, packed our stuff, and went training. Training was a long course (a bit over 14km) that a bunch of us ran together, sort of like a route choice exercise. We dicsussed different choices for the long legs, ran, and then met up at the next control, and so on. The woods here were quite a bit tougher than in Uppsala: the terrain is hillier, the ground is softer, and there is more junk on the ground. It was hard for me to keep up the pace, read the map, and not fall on my face at the same time. But it was a great experience watching some of these guys (Mats, Jan, and company) orienteer. With about 2km to go, I ran out of steam and jogged/walked the rest of the way. The whole weekend was a great experience for me, and I am looking forward to January's ski camp already (though I need to improve my Swedish in a hurry!)

Day 1 of OK Linne's annual planning and training camp. We left Uppsala at 8am on Saturday and drove to the outskirts of Orebro (about 2.5 hours away), where the infamous wet Oringen was in 2000, and close to where Tiomila will be in April. As soon as we got there, we changed and went training. The training consisted of of 3 loops, each a bit less than 3km, in pretty technical but runnable terrain. Running in a couple of centimeters of snow was fun, but the ground wasn't totally frozen, so running in the soft moss was pretty hard, and breaking through the thin ice every step of the way across each marsh wasn't too pleasant.
loop times:
21:37
22:19
20:58

After training, we went to our cabins. Who was living in which one was predetermined weeks ahead of time, as was our whole schedule for the weekend, including the menu: we were given a bag food for the cabin and told what to eat when! I shared my cabin with Jan Troeng, Tomas Stenstrom, Henrik Gohl, Lina Akesson, and Sofie Johansson. As soon as we got to the cabins, we started cooking pasta and turned on the TV to watch the XC Skiing world cup race in Norway. I decided this was a good time to introduce my clubmates to Catching Features, and pulled out my laptop, which unfortunately only has the demo version installed at the moment. Of course, the guys were instantly addicted, and the girls sat on both sides of the player an gave him constant advice when he was lost, which was often.
After lunch, we had a planning meeting, where people discussed the club's results over the last couple of years, talked about goals and events to focus on for next year, as well as the schedule of various club camps and trips. Following this was supper, more Catching Features, and a scheduled "Social activity." We were told that the social activity would be a competition between cabins and given a list of items to bring to a specified location at a certain time, as well as a simple math problem to solve. So, we set out, dressed in the warmest clothes we could find, on what turned out to be a tresaure hunt/quiz through the snow. There were 12 question stations, each marked by a candle burning on top of a pile of snow. To find each question station, we had to use the one headlamp we were told to bring and find a path of reflective tape, with a small piece tape stuck on a tree every 20 meters or so. The questions were mostly of two types: random bits of trivia about the history of Swedish orienteering (Sample question - more or less: why were the results of the 1948 Vasterbotten District Relay Champs voided? (a) A control was misplaced; (b)The course setter went for a walk with the first two control flags after the race started; (c) The course setter thought the event was on a different day and didn't put out controls.)
The other half of the questions were little brain teasers (such as: how do you use six 9's and only the four basic arithmetic operations to get 100).
There was also a bonus question which involved calling a phone number that we got if we solved a math problem correctly. Needless to say, this was tons of fun, especially trying to discuss the answers with my teammates in a mixture of english and swedish and hiking through the woods in the snow on a Saturday night! After all the question stations, the path of reflective tape led us to a gazebo, where a fire was going, and hot dogs and marshmallows were ready for grilling. The results were counted and announced, and our cabin came second, with 10 questions right out of 12. After we returned to the cabins, the evening concluded with a round of Catching Features.














1:b
2:9*9+9+9+9/9=100

C • 8

Runnig to the start and around the cabins a bit.

To/from BMC for project presentations

Was going to take today off, but the presentations for the Knowledge-Based Systems class finished early, and so I went for an easy run in Stadsskogen with Axel. Felt good, except for very tight upper calves, probably from last night's strength training.
OK Linne fall camp this weekend!

To/from class. Made it. Bike still alive. Making awful noises.

Running to and from Hagadalsskolan, then cool-down with Lars.

Night sprint in Eriksberg, set by Bjorn. The first few controls were on a 1:6000 map, then we went over to Kung Bjorn's Hill and the 1:1500 map, then back to 1:6000, and the last piece on another 1:1500 map of Blodstensvagen. Really fun high-speed racing, good run for me except for one stupid route choice to avoid a mapped fence that didn't exist in reality. First time I felt like I was actually racing at night! Also, as Spike predicted, a new PR for time/km at night, even if it's a sprint. Additionally, my best result in any race against the Linne elite so far - 7th place. I'll post the link to results when they are up. The last two night I have followed TYRTOM's advice and have run with a baseplate instead of a thumb compass. I wonder if that has helped make a difference.

C • 7

Circuit training with the club after the night sprint at Hagadalsskolan. Feeling pretty dead afterwards.

Some miserable biking, to and from class, to and from KG. At this point, each time I get on my bike, I think there is about a 60% chance I won't make it to where I am going.

A step forward. My first night-O under 10 min/km! It wasn't a big accomplishment, but it felt good to actually complete a course without major disasters and maintaining map contact most of the way. In the -5C cold, the frost sparkled in the headlmap lights and crunched underfoot, while the full moon looked like a giant headlmap in the sky. Beautiful!

C • 6

Tuesday night line-O in Nasten, plus running to KG and back. It's still so impressive for me to see a mass of headlamps lighting up the forest as Tuesday night training begins! Probably around 50 people today, running in one long line for the first few km, and then spreading out. I tried to follow along on the map, and did ok in the less-detailed areas, but in the toughest stuff I was totally lost. Felt pretty tired towards the end, having slept just 2 hours after getting home from England in the afternoon. RyanAir may be cheap, but they don't make it a pleasant experience, that's for sure! A 6:30am flight, with the only airport bus from Oxford leaving at 1:30 and getting in a bit after 3am. Made for a fun night.

Went over 300 hours training for the year, just for the first time since 2001.

Running at a park in Oxford with Kat at sunset. Jealous of everyone racing the long-O champs! Are the maps from that up somewhere?

C • the map was 25 sq.km. 4

Running to the start and warming up.

Ash Ranges regional event near Southampton, England. Very interesting terrain, with large open areas with knee-high heather: great visibility, tough running, controls often hidden in pits deep inside the heather and very hard to spot. Had trouble adjusting to the map early and lost about 1:30 over the first two controls, then got going, only to make a 4-minute mistake where I simply could not understand the vegetation and the contours. Got angry after that, picked up the pace and finished well. 5th in M21L, 5:30 back of 1st.

After two days off, a nice easy run with Kat in the meadows around Oxford.

Strides

Crunches and stuff

To/from school.
I have a slight cold and decided, after a lot of agonizing, to skip tonight's interval workout, finally making this my easy week. I don't think it'll do me much harm.

To and from school. For the first (though surely not last) time, both ways were in the dark...

Decided to go out on the Stadsskogen map and do a little night-O. Legs feeling dead from yesterday, and I didn't feel super-inspired, but still dragged myself around, surprised to find some actual night-O control markers at a few spots I randomly circled on the map.

C • England, here I come 1

Running to and from the clubhouse + warm-up around the lit trail in Norbyskogen.

Street-night-O in the streets of Uppsala. The distance is the distance traveled (straight-line was 13.5km). Running very fast in the beginning (Swedes like starting out very fast. Why is that?) Some controls had mutliple-choice Swedish trivia questions on them, and the right choice was the control you went to next (the 3 choice controls, A, B, and C, were always pretty close together, so if you got the question wrong (the next control had a sign saying "Wrong!!!" on it), you went to the other choices until finding the right one. Rob Walter and I had no chance at any of these, but it seems that those Swedes that I talked to (Lars, Bjorn) didn't do much better. I was with Lars at #7, when stomach rumblings began and I had to make a pit stop (not an easy feat in an urban street-O!) I was surprised to catch him a couple of controls later, after a leg where the best route choice clearly involved swimming about 25 yards (no one did), and at a control right behind the building where my classes are. After that, all that was left was a long leg through Stadsskogen back to the clubhous, and I started feeling good and pushing the pace. Of course, wily Lars slowed down a bit and took some optimal route through the forest while I ran on the stuff that was on the map and showed up at the finish over a minute after him... Fun race, nice weather - a pleasant change after Denmark!

Warm-up in the rain, with Kat

Denmark Training Camp - Day 3.
"Camp Championships" in the rain. Legs heavy from the start, spiked the first control, messed up the second again. Was reading features carefully, came in over the top of a hill, was supposed to drop down into one of several identical renetrants, didnt drop enough, turned in the wrong direction, realized it, came back, still too high, missed again, finally went lower and got it. Around 3 minutes lost, I think. After that, pretty smooth sailing, mostly due to safe route choices (probably a good idea on tired legs and a very tired brain), until the last control, where I was trying to run away from Karl and missed, losing around a minute, taking Karl with me. James smoked the course in 53:50, Helen almost got me - high 58's !!
Fun course, lots of route choice, fast running and again, different sets of skills needed for different parts of the course.
All in all, a fantastic training camp. Putting us through the worst woods on the first training day was a great idea, as the terrain did feel more and more fun with each workout, and I think most of us went away having enjoyed it quite a bit and looking forward to WOC if we manage to qualify... One important thing I took away from this is that my fear of the words "continental terrain" disappeared. I used to cringe at those words, thinking of boring, identical gullies and ridges with constant reentrant-counting, hillside traversing legs. Either it was the terrain or Tom's course-setting, but orienteering in these Silkeborg woods was really fun, especially at high speed, when seemingly simple routes become difficult to execute perfectly - and anything less than perfection will lose time. More thoughts on this later, bedtime for now. But first, a huge thanks to Tom and the US team for making the camp possible and a thanks to all the other participants for making it really fun!!!!!!!!!!!!

Denmark Training Camp - day 2 morning.
Saturday morning greeted us with rain and a route choice exercise. We formed a group of three with Johan and newly-arrived James Scarborough (yes, in the flesh. yes, he is alive. yes, he has a bionic arm now. no, there was no lion cave. yes, the sex change operation went well.)
For each of the longish legs, we took different routes and compared the splits. I was feeling pretty dead the whole way, while Johan and James were beasts, often taking the tougher routes. In general, there weren't many surprises - going around climb and green on trails tended to pay off, as usual. One thing that happened a couple of times is that nasty-looking routes with climb early on tended to actually be pretty good, especially if they had easy attackpoints. So that's worth thinking about.

Denmark Training Camp - Day 2 afternoon.
"Tennis match" change of pace exercise designed by Tom. Form a group (James, Johan, Helen, and me), start each loop in 30 second intervals or so. Each loop begins with a long, pretty simple mostly-trail leg, on which you are supposed to run as hard as you can, followed by several short technical legs, on which you are supposed to be brain-dead. I am not sure about change of pace, since we pretty much were racing the whole thing - either to stay ahead of people or to catch them, but I thought it was a great way to train orienteering at a pace faster than normal race pace. This time Tom sent us into very nice, fun woods, and our group was pretty even, so we battled hard on every loop. I was orienteered fairly well until managing to screw up the "simple trail leg" on the last loop and turn down the wrong trail for 100m or so.

Jogging to the start and from the finish of the tennis match workout.

Denmark Training Camp - Day 1.
On a relatively warm and dry Danish day, we started off with a pair of line-O's that Tom set for us. "We" included US Team members Karen, Sandra, and me, GB team member Helen Bridle, Swiss Christine Friedrich, my girlfriend Kat, and a bunch of Swedish juniors from Tom's club OK Tyr, including William, the youngest Hollowell (previously, the mascot of the US WOC team in Japan.)
The line-O's were meant to get us acquainted with the terrain and mapping styles, and so sent us happily crashing through everything on the map, from the recently clear-cut slash areas with slow running to areas of medium green with young trees growing close together and slow running, to the darkest green with poke-your-eyes-out-or-crawl young pines, also featuring slow running. It was also reasonably steep, with a couple of hills even reminding us of Japan (except without the giant bugs and spiders.)
Each of the line-O's was followed by a short course with some nice legs, probably typical of continental course-setting: traverse a hillside and climb up the right re-entrant; climb over a ridge and descend the right nose; choice between going over or around a hill - basically, a good way to get the legs moving.
Unfortunately, the course that followed the second line-O had a couple of controls missing that left me a little irritated at the finish - but perhaps it was all part of Tom's design to start us off with some unpleasantness and have the week-end only get better!

C • Line-O 2

Denmark Training Camp - Day 1 (afternoon).
After some soup and a nap, we were back in the woods, this time for a middle distance course - 5.5km, 18 controls. I started first, hit the first control - a pit 100m off a trail junction and then did something i have been doing a lot this fall - speed up and mess up #2. I made a parallel error and tried to convince myself i was in the middle of the green when I was surrounded by beatiful wide open wide forest. Eventually relocated, and climbed down to #2 as Karen, Helen, Karl (one of the Tyr boys) and Johan (the oldest of the Tyr boys - also the fastest) were all climbing out. Frustrated with myself, I sped up some more and started catching people, eventually ending up together with Johan at 6 and getting ahead of him at 7, as he ran too far down a trail (knowing when to turn off a trail into the woods seems to be a crucial skill here, by the way - reading stuff such as contours, vegetation, and numerous trail junction as you run along a path is really important). Johan got close to me again at 10, as I got stuck in the green that looked nasty on the map and was even nastier in real life - but when the control is right in the middle of it, you don't have much choice. We continued this low-speed chase climbing over fallen trees and fighting through crap for the next several hundred meters and finally emerged into gorgeous white forest, still about 50m apart. With great visibility and fast running, Johan gradually closed the gap and eventually caught me at 14. We both pushed hard the rest of the way, but were obviously tired from the morning, as neither of us managed to get away from the other. It was fun racing head-to-head in Danish terrain. One thing I noticed is that you have to constantly keep adjusting to different woods - going from flat wide open white areas to contour detail on the hillsides to green where you have to ultra-careful to complex trail networks where you have to run super-fast but need to keep paying attention to the map sprint-style.

Denmark Training Camp - Day 1 afternoon
After finishing the middle distance course, Johan and I crossed the road and went for an easy run backwards around another course Tom designed for us, on beautiful sand-dune/open forest terrain that is unfortunately not WOC-relevant. Still, it was lot of fun to run in woods with absolutely no undergrowth, great visibility, and complex micro-contours. The visibility was so good that going from 8 to 7 we saw number 6 up ahead and went straight to it, not realizing we weren't at 7... By the end, I was barely dragging my feet - a long, fun day of training.

Seriously, I am not convinced my bike will make it through the next week.

A soccer game after class. I thought about going and doing night-O training afterwards, but was quite tired and decided to rest before the Denmark training camp. And yes, I know I should have chosen night-O and not soccer, I have no excuse.

To/from school. My bike is falling apart.

To the clubhouse, then to the start of Backbana with everybody.

Ok, so this was supposed to be the easy week. The plan for today was to run the backbana course (about 13km, 300m climb on trails) pretty easy. Last time it took me 67 minutes, I think, so I was planning to do it a bit faster. The problem was, though, that there weren't enough maps and in the dark, having only run the course once, I couldn't remember any of the turns and so on, so I had to run with someone who knew the way. I picked Lars and ran with him and it somehow turned into a level 5 workout. I was feeling very strong on uphills, terrified on downhills. This was definitely the fastest I've ever run at night, so it felt cool. It's also nice to know that I can keep up with very good orienteers, even if just on trails...

C • Holy improvement, Batman! 6

Dragging myself home after the backbana.