Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Didn't feel too bad today but decided to give it a day to settle down (plus tomorrow morning looks appealing as a training prospect). Spent the day going across Denmark in preparation for crossing to Norway tomorrow - a process which involved a reasonable amount of driving and two ferry rides (one small, one longer). Spent most of the longer crossing screen-surfing between online coverage of the JWOC relay, the AFL and the NRL.

I think Jenny was quite pleased to see a 1:100000 topographic atlas of Denmark on special at an Arhus bookshop (and I wasn't exactly upset either).

Ended the day at Hirtshals, on the northwest coast - sand dune country. Also wide sandy beach country, and what must be one of the few beaches in Europe which can be legally driven on (although based on what we saw, it demonstrated evidence of the limited experience many Europeans have of off-road driving, including one German vehicle which was comprehensively bogged).

Couldn't hold my body together for a full week of competition in the end. I knew by halfway to the first control that I would do well to get around the course; kept plugging away in the hope of loosening up, taking track routes to the extent that I could and hoping that I might come good on the long 9th leg, but I didn't. Shortly afterwards, able at best to jog on the tracks (and, as it happened, sixth-last and going backwards), I decided that it wasn't really worth slogging around half-fit to come near-last as in Gothenburg three years ago, and called it a day (from one of the further corners of the map, too). Did manage to find enough to avoid the Walk Of Shame up the chute, but not with a lot to spare.

Given that this is the second time in three years that I've fallen apart at the last hurdle in a World Masters week after being previously OK, it does suggest that there may be an outer limit to what I can string together at the moment (hopefully not, with O-ringen still to come). At least there was a decent middle to show for this week.

Very casual walk/jog around some model event controls. I suspect the model event area was chosen more for not being on the final map, and having access to suitable parking, than for its similarity to the final terrain - it was rather scrappy and green, with almost none of the very open forests we saw on the way in. Main lesson learned is that green is mostly low deciduous regrowth (unlike the other days, when it's often been closely planted spruce) and is less crashable than on previous days. Didn't want to push things too hard physically; my back was on the edge a bit before yesterday and the body only has to hold out for one more day...

Saw numerous people walking into the forest holding swords, shields and similar paraphenalia. I don't think they were there for the orienteering.

Now that yesterday's splits have seen the light of day, it seems that I was saved by the low-visibility 13 and 14; hit both of them well and gained 10 places across the pair.

WMOC middle final, 54th. A pretty satisfying run. I'd feared the worst when I had a stiff back in the morning (but knew that that doesn't necessarily mean problems on the run), and didn't feel great in the warm-up either, but was OK on the running side once I actually started. The key, though, was the navigation, and that was the side that went well - only three very minor wobbles (probably not more than 15 seconds apiece), in a terrain type (lots of controls on point features in light green without much definition in the contours) that I've often struggled in historically. Tired a bit at the end and my 1- and 2-minute men, whom I'd just seen, blew me away in the chute (a critical time gain for the former), but had to be reasonably satisfied with my run at my current level.

The next step was to see if it would be enough to keep me in the A for the long - which meant I needed to finish ahead of 20 people. For a while this looked like it would be fairly tight, but a few blowouts and mispunches at the sharp end of the start list meant it was fairly comfortable in terms of places, if not time (7 places, but only about 50 seconds).

This race was won in a rather frightening 25 minutes.

WMOC forest qualifier. Cut it fine and thought for most of the day that I wasn't going to make it - at one stage I was in the position of having to beat 8 of the last 10 starters to get through, but ended up getting 9 of them (and even then I wasn't totally sure, because a few people - although only one in our class - got new start times after missing their starts due to traffic jams).

The run itself was a steady one without being anything too special. Had one mistake of consequence, a 1-minuter on 9, and a bit hesitant on a few (particularly the flatter, lower-visibility ones), but my splits were in general very consistent - just consistently not very fast. At the sharp end of our heat, Fredrik Lowegren did 45, and Matthias Niggli 47. Not as spread out as usual for a forest qualifier, a reflection of the reasonably flat and fast terrain.

Under no illusions as to my capacity to contend at the front end tomorrow, even if (as I hope) it will be more technical. Number one goal is to avoid becoming a victim of the rule I was responsible for writing and stay out of the bottom 25% (who go down to the long B final).

WMOC forest model event, largely about getting myself used to the forest type (a bit lower-visibility than I expected) and learning about the quirks of the terrain. (There's never a lot of fine navigation at these). Did make one mistake, when I followed the herd down an unmapped track (which I suspect wasn't there this time yesterday) instead of the one I should have been looking on.

Lessons learned: the coastal strip will probably be trickiest (and as there were model controls in it I presume there will also be competition controls in it), light green isn't terribly green, root mounds are mapped as high points, fallen logs as logpiles, and the terrain does track. (Not sure if I wanted to know that, as third starter tomorrow). Didn't feel that sharp running, but then a model event rarely sees that.

The model event was by a surf beach of sorts, complete with red and yellow flags and a board marked 'Surf Rescue'.

WMOC sprint B final in the centre of Copenhagen. About where I expected to be with the time - about 2 minutes down (there's always someone good who's blown the qualifier), but very disappointed with the place, nearly halfway down the field - I didn't expect a B final to be as tightly clustered as that. This reflected a technically simple course, with only about 5 legs which provided much of a challenge (and even then, mostly still 2s on the David May scale, not 3s or 4s).

Felt as if I never properly loosened up on this run, although my kilometre rates seemed to be a bit faster on the whole than on the non-forest legs yesterday. Didn't lose any time that I know of, and would want not to have done on that course (as a late starter, I'd heard about the only two significant traps in the area before I went out).

The shorter courses from start 1 seemed to be the ones which suffered here - long courses from start 1, and all the ones I saw from start 2, were much better (the early part of the start 2 courses was particularly good). Unsurprisingly for an inner-city area, access issues were apparently significant.

Tash smashed it again, and Hermann was second. I'll be happy if I'm still up to doing these in 2065.

WMOC sprint qualifier. A few times in recent years I've finished just on the right side of the cut line, but that luck ran out today - didn't really do anything wrong but wasn't quite fast enough on a not-especially-technical course. (Last year I was saved by the technical bit, being 37th in the first half of the course and 9th on the second). Ended up missing out by 30 seconds; normally I'd consider 3.50 down on Matthias Niggli to be a reasonably respectable result, but the depth here is considerable. (That distance behind would have got through in heat 2, but not in the insanely tight heat 1 where you needed to be within 2.20 to get through).

The setters made the most of the terrain they had, but there really wasn't anything much beyond left/right choices around irregularly shaped buildings.

Last time I was in a WMOC B final I won it by seven minutes. Don't think that will be happening tomorrow :-).

Won't blame anything on distraction caused by the Russian starting with me, who was wearing very tight shorts which made it evident that he was well-endowed. Reminded me somewhat of the Dave Culbert wobbly bits incident. (Google and Wikipedia are both disappointingly deficient on this; my recollection is that in one of the lead-up meets to the 1992 Olympics, a British official of reasonably advanced years complained that his clothing made his "wobbly bits" too visible).

Event: World Masters Orienteering Championships 2018
 

My first proper experience of indoor-O (at least at running speed), using a multi-level school and a nearby building - lots of randomly open/closed doors and other barriers, plus tables in classrooms arranged into mazes to complicate things a bit more.

Before starting, I was hearing things like "the hardest thing I've ever done" and "richtig schwer". Anything which increases the navigation-to-running balance is likely to be to my advantage, and so it turned out after I settled into the map - managed to avoid disaster, which is the main thing here, although it was a bit annoying that a small route choice error on the last leg cost me five places (dropping me from the front to the back of a close bunch). Ended up 13th out of 180-odd. Heaps of fun - pity we're never likely to have an event like this in Australia (and not only because our schools tend not to be four-level buildings).

Was feeling a bit old this morning at the Helsingor hostel - I think the 90th percentile of the age distribution there would have been about 12. Also had a look around the outside of the castle (passing en route the Hamlet nursing home), seeing in the process some very drought-bleached grass.

Brief trot around the WMOC model map, mainly just to check out some map interpretations.

Seem to have finally shaken off my Chinese stomach bug after 10 days. Maybe it was the classic Swedish pizza in Gothenburg yesterday (chicken, banana, pineapple, peanut and curry sauce) which did the trick.

C • You brought that up again! 3

A training run on the WMOC 2015 model area in Gothenburg. The hills and rocks are still as steep but the ground vegetation was unrecognisable - the leaf litter was as crunchy as a Bendigo February, and marshes (at least the ones I tried) were nonexistent.

Found the steep hills hard going and wasn't always sure if I'd found the correct places (with no flags out), but a delightful bit of terrain to be out in. Perhaps the nicest bit was found by mistake when I came the wrong way off a hill and ended up going through some lovely open forest along the side of a lake. Not feeling too bad running.

Continued to Denmark this evening.