Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

A travel day up to north-western Spain, involving a couple of buses and slightly more convoluted connections in Porto than I was expecting.

I've long been drawn to the wilder Atlantic reaches of Europe - must be the Cornish blood. Previously I've spent time in the likes of Arctic Norway, the Outer Hebrides and Donegal, and am now adding Galicia to the list. No bleak windswept moorlands here though - parts of the country on the way through, with towering eucalypts, bracken and granite boulders, could easily pass for St. Helens (or Gippsland if you take away the boulders).

The place has a reputation as being something of a backwater, an impression not dispelled by Galicia's voters who took until 2005 before they got around to booting Franco's last cronies out of the provincial government, but like a lot of alleged backwaters it's a nice place to look at.

It was seventeen years ago that I last waited for the start of a world championship race with a chance at a medal. That time, the JWOC relay (where Grant had come in with the lead on the first leg), my hopes were to be dashed before I started. This time it was a more drawn-out process. In a sense it was a bit like one of my other big races of the year, the Canberra Marathon; a result (8th) that I would have taken at the start of the week, but one which promised so much more.

The terrain was quite different to the qualifiers and I didn´t handle the shift as well as I would have liked. We had an idea it would be a lot tougher when news came through that Nick Barrable (who´s still too young for this caper) had pre-run the course in 81. It was tougher, with a lot of steep dunes, especially in the middle, and thicker vegetation than the other days. (The qualifying maps had more green on them, but it was mostly in blocks and easily avoidable).

My start was reasonable, drifting a bit on 2 but with no real damage, so it was quite a surprise when Girts Lenins caught me at 5. This rattled me a bit at the time, although less so once it became apparent, after leaving the low-vis section from 6 to 9, that he was running much too fast for me and that if I tried to stay with him I´d blow up trying (he eventually won silver). Shortly after I felt like I was blowing up anyway on the toughest physical part of the course; I didn´t have the necessary strength to power up the steepest dunes well. From there it was a bit of a grind, hoping to keep hitting controls and find a second wind (which happened to some extent in the last third). I made my only significant mistake of the week at 17, a one-minuter, but came home reasonably well. I thought when I finished that it was probably an outer-edges-of-top-10 run and that´s what it turned out to be.

I would have liked something better than this - it was my worst run of the week, although the standard was pretty high. A medal would have been out of reach, though, even on a perfect day. Great result for Tash, and a pretty good day for Australia generally with eight top-ten places.

Now for the trip across to the Czech Republic, via northern Spain, stage 5 of the Tour and a couple of days in Paris.

C • Nice run 3

A fairly easy recovery run, although it didn't feel quite as good as Tuesday's equivalent - a bit iffy in the stomach at times. Hope this is a product of doing it too close to breakfast and not an indicator that I'm going to be sick for the big day. Spent the run around the top of Nazare again. One section felt like home because it was through an area of mature eucalypts (and one we'd love to have ourselves, sand-dune contours and no undergrowth). There have been patches of young eucalypts on the WMOC maps and even the odd isolated eucalypt mapped as a distinctive tree, something I haven't seen since the late and lamented Stony Creek/Arachnicopia in Canberra.

Elsewhere, my decade-long project to get historical results online now involves the last few missing Easters. I've recently been doing some work on Easter 1978. It may be of interest that 23 of the M21A field are still orienteering to my knowledge (two - Warren Key and Terry Farrell - are still running elite races), and the oldest age group contained a few creaky antiques running M56. Not sure if phatmax wants to enlighten us as to what happened after day 1. Another item of interest was the presence of one Derek Clayton, who at that stage still held the world marathon record, at 41st in M35A. Perhaps surprisingly he was around that place on all three days, although I suspect he would have won more than his share of splits had such things existed in 1978.

That Easter was at Turallo Creek, which was the scene of two of my more memorable events for very different reasons - the 1987 event where a permission stuff-up saw me chased off the area by shooters, and the best head-to-head race I've ever run, slugging it out with Jock Davis in 1991. We ran 16.2k in 77, the last 6 in 26, and Jock finally broke me by running the 1050m last leg in 3.10 (that's not a typo). I can't run that fast on an athletics track.

Another very good run with only a minor 15-second wobble at 18 preventing it from being as exceptional technically as yesterday. Didn't feel quite as good running as yesterday either, but that's splitting hairs. Again about 3-4 minutes off the pace. Felt as if I was losing concentration a little on the short legs at the end but got away without any significant time loss.

As was the case yesterday, there were short legs in the detail early and late and longer legs out the back in the middle in simpler terrain where vegetation changes were the main feature. This section wasn't as steep as yesterday and the long leg from 6 to 7 (2.5k across the map) didn't have much route choice at all - it was the Pauline Hanson leg, just give anything that wasn't white as wide a berth as possible - although there were some better route choice options on shorter legs after that.

Didn't place quite as well as yesterday, but still fifth overall in a closely bunched field. The imbalance between the two heats is quite remarkable with 9 of the 10 fastest times coming from our heat (the lengths were the same and winning times similar). That will suit me for the final, I think, as it will make it harder for packs to form with most of the best people spread by 4 minutes instead of 2. If I can stay on top of the wave for another day a par result on Saturday is probably somewhere between 4th and 8th; for a medal I'll need a very good run of my own and some help from one or more of the top three stuffing up.

C • Trust the qualification results? 2

Today is my 30th orienteering birthday - my first event was at the no-longer-standing Narrabundah Hill on 2 July 1978. My chief memory of that event was its abysmal weather - and a check of the observations showed that my memory wasn't flawed in that respect.

I celebrated this occasion by having what would have to be close to the most technically precise run I've had in technical terrain in those 30 years. It was the first long distance qualifier and my objective was to avoid making any significant errors. That was certainly achieved - the closest I came to a mistake all day was stopping for a couple of seconds because I couldn't see the flag which was on the other side of a tree. I was also running pretty solidly, although holding a little back on the steeper dune climbs - the fact that it wasn't quite a 100% physical effort will stop me rating this as one of my best runs ever, but I'm certainly pleased with it. Was it really only eleven days ago that I was jogging back to the finish in Norway, my confidence completely shattered after being unable to come to terms with the way the contours were simplified there?

It's always hard to know what to make of qualifying results because you don't know the extent to which your opposition is holding something back. I'm fourth behind three Swedes, none of whom featured in the sprint (and including two names I recognise - Klas Karlsson and Stefan Sandahl), three minutes off the lead. Going out six or seven from the end in the final would be a good position, I think, if these results are repeated tomorrow. Our heat certainly looks to be much stronger than the other one unless the courses were drastically different. The field also looks stronger than it was for the sprint (thanks to the aforementioned Swedes) and equalling or bettering my fourth from the sprint will not be easy, but it's been a good week so far and you never know what might be possible.

The area was decent and the mapping was good - none of the problems from Friday's map were in evidence today - although some of the control placements were fairly easy and there were a couple of legs with straightforward track options (not that the tracks are any faster than the white because they are often quite sandy).

Off the course, it's good to see that the Americans are up with the times - they've decided that after his 90th birthday it's about time they took Nelson Mandela off their list of known terrorists. Presumably he's a bit too frail these days to hijack any planes.

C • top work 1

A decent recovery run around the top of the escarpment of Nazare to the old clifftop village and back again. Achilles a little sore early on but settled after 10 minutes or so. Flowing nicely by the last couple of kilometres, only disturbed by an annoying dog, possibly the same one that's been intermittently waking us up on the last few nights.

Almost but not quite. Before the start of this week I would not have considered a sprint medal to be a realistic possibility, but the qualifiers gave me some cause for believing that it might happen if things went well today.

Things did go well today. It was a more varied course today (part new town, part old town, part dunes), although perhaps not quite as good as that of yesterday. (As I suspected, the choice of areas was dictated by a city centre not being usable midweek and a beach resort not being usable on Sunday). I've sometimes struggled to reach a peak of mental intensity for races in recent years but felt as if I really had it today, with just the right amount of nerves to think this was really important, and this seemed to flow through into my running speed. The navigation wasn't bad either, with nothing bigger than 5 to 10 seconds (which didn't ultimately make any difference to the result). I started with Jim and ran with him for a largely common stretch in midcourse, then was near the Czech M35 who I'd caught a minute for most of the remainder.

I was fourth when I finished, which was a little disappointing, thinking that I would drop a few places with five still to come. I thought I might get one or two of them, but as it turned out I got all five and held onto fourth place. It's a little frustrating being only one place away from a medal, but only a little, and I never would have expected this result in a sprint. It's certainly a very encouraging sign for the long distance, especially as I now know there is nobody in this field who I can't beat, as I've been ahead of everyone else in the field at least once out of the two days. Just have to beat them all on the same day now. (The field is not especially strong, with only two other former WOC runners present that I can see, both with records as mediocre as mine, but you can only beat the ones who turn up).

It was a pretty good day for Australia with a silver (Tash), three bronzes (Warren, Jeffa and Hermann), and Jim and I were both fourth.

The organisers first called Hermann an Austrian and then a New Zealander, but that may just be revenge against Australia for inflicting so much crappy reality TV upon the Portuguese. I certainly didn't expect to see the Penrith Police Station featuring prominently on the box here. There was also a sketch comedy show courtesy of Aranda Primary`s most famous old boy (Mick Molloy) which was quite funny but will have gone straight over the heads of the locals, who have presumably never heard of Nikki Webster, Derryn Hinch, Delta Goodrem or Rove McManus. I also noted that the subtitlers didn`t even attempt to translate someone`s line about making life easy for burglars that `you might as well give him a pick, a shovel and a map of Belanglo State Forest`.

(When it comes to local productions, it appears that Joe Hockey has a new job hosting the Portuguese version of `The Price is Right`).

C • Wow... 11