Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Event: Oringen 2008
 

A lot of travelling today which made it a good day to schedule a rest day, although I woke up early enough that I would have had time to squeeze something in had I still been looking to maintain a multi-year streak. The sequence was Olomouc to Prague by train (very nice, although that was partly because I'd booked a first-class ticket by mistake when I thought the ticket clerk was asking me whether I wanted a one-way or return), Prague to Oslo by plane (fairly painless, although the luggage took forever to arrive, and my quest for a watch continues because of the 82 shops that Prague airport boasts about, 80 of them appear to sell exactly the same items - grog, cigarettes, perfume and sometimes chocolate), and Oslo to Salen by bus (also fairly painless, except for the reminder at the food stop as to how expensive Norway is).

The WOC results were probably at or slightly above expectations - the relays were around where I thought we'd be but I didn't think we'd get any individual results quite as good as 14th. (Kathryn probably got some help from running with Liisa Anttila, but as someone has done an analysis which has found that 60% of the women's field spent significant time in packs she was hardly alone in that). The women will be even more formidable next year if we get Hanny back, but the same can't be said for the men - there is a steep drop from the top three to the rest and the word is that some, perhaps even all, of those three won't be fronting next year. (Take out the top three from this year and you'd be left with a team which looked something like Kerrin, William, Matt and Reuben - probably capable of getting in or close to the top 20 in the relay, but any individual final appearance would be a bonus).

One of the more dramatic days that I can recall in orienteering - it's definitely not every relay which has three lead changes in the last five controls, and the leader at the start of that section departing the vicinity of the last control, not in the company of triumphant flag-waving teammates, but in the back of a helicopter. (As I've noted on the WOC thread, Thierry appears to have recovered very quickly indeed and I think he's probably still going to race this week).

As often on such days my own run was a relatively minor consideration after this - just a quick session around the streets of Olomouc sandwiched between return and WOC banquet. It ended up being my best run of the week - the first time since Monday when running hasn't seemed like a chore, especially in the second half, much of which was spent on a dirt path along one of the rivers. Of the occasional local hazards of dogs and drunks, I saw one of each but both were harmless.

Once again ran poorly after a day when my mind had been on other people's races most of the time. Lost time at 1, a dodgy ditch end in the green, then settled down a bit, but further mistakes, none of them huge, at 7, 12 and 17. 12 was particularly annoying because I'd seen people running the leg about 60 times during the day (it was one of the TV controls) and still stuffed it up. Didn't have a huge amount of energy for the bigger climbs either, especially at 9 where I took the low route and had a steep 11-contour climb at the end, a lot of it through felled stuff, with the flag visible all of the way.

I'm still not at all confident running on loose wet rock, and took a fall coming out of 12 which would have been spectacular for the cameras had they still been there. I ended up with a bruised hand from this and a bruised ego from being comprehensively outsprinted by one of the local W14s (although the latter event is not unheard of - Amber Morrison did it to me when she was 10).

My focus this week has been on things other than my own performances - it's probably no coincidence that my best run by far of the week was the day with no WOC race - but I'm still a bit concerned that I haven't had a really good run physically since Bordeaux. Hopefully I'll be able to focus well next week and come through more strongly then.

Didn't stay around for the public race presentations, so I can't report on whether the Czech clubs still do some of the more extravagant celebrations that I remember from the 1996 5-Days (the club 'train dance' whenever someone from the Lokomotiva Pardubice club went up on stage being the most memorable).

In the name of using this run for suburban exploration, I spent it in search of Stalinist architectural atrocities in the suburbs of Olomouc. You have to look pretty hard these days to find monoliths of decaying grey concrete - a lot of them have had some serious paintwork (one set of apartment blocks had the greatest range of colours I've seen this side of the old Benjamin Way offices, now demolished), and in the spirit of capitalism some have ads on their sides. I did find a few examples but suspect for real highlights of the genre you need to go to the Ukraine or Belarus (or the Housing Commission towers in Collingwood).

As for the run: about as good as I expected after a day of IOF meetings and eating too much at the supporters' afternoon tea before going for a run at about 6.45 (i.e. not very).

I've discovered that Connex run buses here too. This would mean that, had I been paying attention, I would now know how to say "Connex apologises for any inconvenience caused" in English, French, Dutch, Czech and Portuguese. (Most of the time here we've been using the excellent trams).

The longest day in orienteering is a two-race middle distance day. It is even longer when there is a long journey to the event area (and a 1600 metre walk from parking to arena, a walk we did four times during the day), and when it was raining, as it was for most of the morning. It certainly wasn't as hard spectating at WOC as it was actually running it, but it was still a very long day. After filing a report for the OA website and getting something to eat, I finally got back to my room at 10.30 p.m. (Normally I'd regard going to McDonalds in a foreign country as showing a severe lack of imagination, but there wasn't a lot else open at 10.15 in Olomouc).

In between the two WOC races we had a race of our own - just to add to the logistical challenge this was a few kilometres away with a shuttle bus (which worked as well as could be expected). It was reputed to be a tough area from reports we've heard of WOC training there. It was certainly slow, with more rock than we've had on other days, but I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to on a day when competing could be a slightly unwelcome distraction from other matters.

For most of the run my own race was slow and cautious, especially in the green, but reasonably clean. Annoyingly, I then lost time at a late control in low visibility as I did on Monday - about 2 minutes on 18 this time. Lacked confidence, though, running on the wet small rocks in the early part of the course.

Scarily, someone who is presumably not good enough to make the Czech team did 6.5 min/km on this.

The IOF and media race, at an area that was partly fairly easy forest and partly golf course (the first time I've seen a golf course mapped at the level of detail that a 1:5000 map allows, with bunkers and so on). Didn't feel hugely motivated for a fast run but got going once I was into the map, as sometimes happens on these occasions. Running quite fast - at least for me - by the end., and didn't miss anything.

(It looked like a pretty good golf course and I'm surprised they let us run on it, although it had mainly been used for the Trail-O event. The bunker near the start was fearsome and Tiger Woods would struggle to get up and down in two from it).

I found out last time that some of the opposition at this race can be pretty formidable, so it was no surprise to be well behind the likes of Bjornar Valstad, Tore Sagvolden and Sixten Sild. I was less pleased to be 7 seconds down on Tom Karlsen (a regular M55 WMOC medallist). Our splits were virtually identical so we clearly run at the same speed.

Today's event followed the WOC long qualification, and I set about demonstrating what the selectors had missed out on by failing to select me for the long distance. The answer - absolutely nothing.

I didn't feel that sharp in the warm-up and then started very poorly both physcially and technically, missing each of the first 3, 3 quite badly (2.5 mins), although I'm not 100% convinced of the control placement/mapping there. Settled a bit after that but never as strong as I was yesterday. Not really in control through the final control-picking stage in flat, marshy low visibility terrain, but managed to get through without a huge time loss.

This was a poor run, but I was still surprised just how far back I was - 22 minutes compared with 10 yesterday when I felt it was perhaps 5-7 minutes worse than yesterday. On km rates I would have been about 3 minutes behind Kerrin, and couldn't see myself breaking 75 for the WOC qualifier under even ideal circumstances, which would still be a long way from qualifying (albeit perhaps a bit closer than I was 2 years ago in Denmark).

The route to the event took us past a facility which now proudly proclaims itself to be a tank factory. According to Zsuzsa Fey (who has a certain amount of experience of life under communism) such facilities were quite often officially "bicycle factories" in a past life. Probably a fair number were tractor factories too.

One aspect of Australian elite orienteering where my speed has long been noted (more so than on the course) is at the dining table. It now appears that I have a rival, in the perhaps slightly unexpected form of Bridget Anderson.

C • Terrain 5

First day of the public races. For those who are doing them it is six days in a row, two longs then four middles. I´ll miss two days through IOF meetings (it´s four days out of six so I will still get an overall result) and in any case this is not a high priority compared with next week.

This was expected to be the most physical day of the week, and was fairly solid going with several trips up and down an escarpment early on. It was classic central European terrain - lots of tracks and vegetation changes, and point features on slopes with very little definition in the contours.

For the most part I was happy with this run but it was a disappointment to lose a bit of time at the very end - 20 seconds on 18 and 40 on 19. Apart them that I was spiking controls pretty well which isn´t always easy in this terrain, and was also happy with my strength on the hills - even won a split on a steep uphill leg. A pleasantly cool day. 18th out of 50 in 21E when I left.

Previously at a Czech 5-day I´ve seen someone have a smoke in the start box. No-one was smoking in the start box this year but someone was doing it on the way to the start. Also saw a very old Skoda parked at the drink station in the forest, with a number plate starting PVC, possibly a reference to what the car was made out of.

Today was also the first day of the World Trail-O Championships (a form of the sport for the disabled). The Stating the Bleeding Obvious Award goes to whoever put a ´Forbidden Area For Trail-O´ sign at the foot of a steep staircase that was hard enough for the able-bodied to negotiate.

A fairly casual circuit of central Olomouc with Liggo in the time window in between the WOC sprint qualifying and final. Rather warm and humid, felt reasonable while running but not spectacular. Most memorable moment was seeing two people fishing a third person (presumably drunk, but conscious) out of the river.

I thought this would be a long but fairly straightforward trip from Paris to Olomouc, but it turned out to be anything but. The legs were supposed to be Paris-Mannheim, then an overnight train to Dresden, then a connection to Prague, then another one to Olomouc (hopefully linking up with a few of the other Australians in Prague).

First hint of trouble was when the train (one of the fast ICE ones) was stopped at the first station in Germany and we had to change to another one. Remarkably, we only ended up 20 minutes late in Mannheim after this (although it´s fortunate I speak some German as the announcements telling us what platform to go to, which contradicted the multilingual ones we got on the first train, were only in German), and the overnight train was on time. Early the next morning, though, I woke up to an announcement that I thought said we were 140 minutes late. That can´t be right - this is Germany. I ask someone else in the compartment. It is right. We also got free coffee and 25% off the train ticket (but I suspect the process of claiming it will be more hassle than it´s worth). With this I missed the connection in Dresden, and everyone else moved on from Prague without me (my texting finger got a fair workout).

Piecing together what happened, an ICE train derailed in Cologne on Friday (spectacular but apparently no serious injuries). I think what´s then happened was that all other ICE trains were pulled off service at the first chance for checks, and with lots of trains being pressed into service as replacements, there was no locomotive to pull our half of the train when it split into Berlin and Dresden halves in the middle of the night. I woke a few times during the night and thought the ride was so smooth that it hardly seemed like we were moving - turned out we weren´t. In the circumstances I think we did well to be only two hours late - if it was V-line we´d still be standing by the side of the road waiting for them to beg, borrow or steal some buses.

The eventfulness wasn´t over. I arrived at Prague to see the station hall filled by about 400 teenagers (floorball players, as it happens) and hoped they were on a different train. They weren´t. This meant a very crowded trip indeed for the last leg, although others who came on different trains said those were just as bad. Finally stepped onto the platform at Olomouc 24 hours (minus 30 seconds) after leaving Paris.

A longer session in Paris.

David (the friend I'm staying with) is a pretty reasonable runner in his own right - some of you will have come across him in the Sydney Corporate Cup in the 1990s and early 2000s (and in my first foray into competitive running, under-10s at Little Athletics, my first objective was to finish on the same lap as him in the 1500). He's not doing much at the moment, being in recovery mode from doing a 250km race in the Gobi Desert (as you do), so hasn't been coming out with me, but did provide some excellent pointers to reasonably traffic-free routes. Today's route first went close to the Bastille, before picking up a path along what I'd guess was a former elevated railway to a loop through the Bois de Vincennes, a forest on the east edge of town. (Trivia question - how many prisoners were freed when the Bastille was stormed in 1789?).

Even in the urban areas I've been lucky with the traffic the last couple of days; even had a couple of friendly gendarmes stop the traffic for me this morning (OK, so they were really interested in the jam that was building on the other side of the intersection).

Despite all these advantages (and a cooler morning), though, it was a pretty ordinary run. Although there's been nothing intense this week, it is the first time for a very long time (maybe even the first ever) that I've gone over an hour on five days in a row and maybe that makes a difference. If it does then it should be sorted out quickly as I'll be spending most of the next 24 hours travelling.

Paris in early July is, not surprisingly, tourist central (and spending an hour waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower is a bit annoying), but there's an awful lot to see here and I've only scratched the surface in two days (and the food's good too). On the way to Olomouc tonight.

Did make a sighting of a genuine Australian-style boganmobile parked outside Notre Dame, complete with spoilers, oversized exhaust and fluffy dice. I guess it's progress that suburban Parisians are hotting up cars instead of setting them on fire (although the locals insist that the troubles of a couple of years back were blown out of proportion by the media, - something which of course has never happened in the history of the world).

C • Trivia answer: 2

Event: WOC 2008
 

Last time I was in Paris I spent precisely 22 minutes in the city. It was one of my epic European overland trips back in 1994 (Fiesch, Switzerland to Winchester, England in a day, involving six mainline trains, four underground/emtro ones, a bus and a ferry), and I had that long to get from Gare de Lyon to Gare de Nord. After a sprint up the stairs of the latter (almost flattening an old lady in the process) I made it with 15 seconds to spare.

This time I've got two days here, staying with a friend of very long standing (like since pre-school), and long-time partner in backyard cricket (and once a rogaine). Couldn't ask for a much better location - within 200 metres of Notre Dame. It must be very expensive real estate but when your job over the last three years has been running a commodities fund I guess you can afford very expensive real estate. (It also gives him licence to travel on company money pretty much anywhere in the world where there's a mine, so we were comparing notes last night on the highlights of Almaty, Kazakhstan).

In a big city one's choice of running routes is constrained a bit by finding options that are reasonably traffic-free. Rivers are often good for this and the Seine was the centrepiece of this run, going down as far as a park about 20 minutes away, then coming back up as far as the Louvre and finishing up with a circuit of Notre Dame. Felt reasonable without being spectacular. This week is really a week of maintenance training.

C • are you heading straight to... 3

In France for the first time since the 1996 World Cup events (and that was so close to the Swiss border it hardly counts). Yesterday turned out to be one of those days with lots of petty irritations (think walk a couple of km with your gear from the bus station to the train station, go through one slow queue and then another because all the ticket machines are broken, then discover that you're at the wrong station anyway and have another couple of km to walk), but all was happy again after a nice dinner on a nice square in Bordeaux.

This morning was a longer one, taking advantage of the fact that my train didn't leave until 10.47. I plotted a course on a map at the hotel which seemed reasonably promising, along the river and then across to a lake. It was a reasonably good route on the whole, although I hadn't noticed that my route took me past the Place de Reception des Dechets Urbains and the Unite de Traitement des Eaux Usees, which sound a lot better in French than they do in English (the tip and sewage treatment works respectively - at least they didn't smell too much). Spotted a few other groups of runners near the lake, including one group carrying a ladder - presumably firemen in training. Came back inland from the river; as sometimes happens in unknown cities I spent some of this on a more major road than I would have liked because I didn't trust my map memory enough to be more adventurous, until reaching the stadium at which point I knew it was 4km due east (this time I remembered to take my compass).

I feared the worst for this run when my Achilles was sore when I woke up but it settled quickly, and after a mundane first half the second half was very smooth, especially the last 30 minutes.

The next mission of the day was to get to Chateauroux for the end of today's stage of the Tour. I hadn't planned this trip around the Tour, but when I saw that my planned route could intercept it with some minor modifications I thought 'why not'? For a while I thought I wasn't going to make it because we had a 44-minute connection in Limoges and left Bordeaux 43 minutes late, but made up enough time en route to have a little to spare. As might be expected the Tour (and its build-up) is quite a spectacle, although it's all over in 10 seconds once the riders arrive - I was on a corner about 1.5km from the finish. Didn't find out who actually won the stage until I got to Paris.

C • Good finish to watch 3