Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

A problem which sometimes afflicts WOC qualification events in the more developed countries is that they assume nobody would want to watch the qualification races because everyone of interest is going to get through anyway. In 2010 this manifested itself through the sprint qualification starting at 9 - which isn't a problem in itself except that Trondheim's public buses don't start on a Sunday until 9.30 or 10, and the qualification was 7km away from where I was staying.

For me there was an obvious solution to this problem (not sure it would have suited all the spectators, though). It was slightly awkward running with a pack and again it took 10 minutes or so to loosen up, but not too bad after that. Perhaps I was thinking this way because it was City To Surf day, but the climb out of town was remarkably similar to the Rose Bay hill in terms of length, gradient, orientation of slope and windiness. I just didn't have several tens of thousands of other people to share it with.

The WOC performances themselves were reasonable without being brilliant; not sure if any of the finalists were especially happy with their final runs. It was fairly remarkable that only 4.5 seconds covered the men's top six.

And WOC was a minute old when the first blast came from a vuvuzela. Whether it sounded any better than the official WOC song is left as an exercise for the reader.

C • official woc song 1

Recovery run from the Zurich youth hostel. The plan was to go along the lake but there isn't a path along the lake so it was mainly a road run. Stiff as expected early on but loosened reasonably as it went on; at no stage was it stellar but it could have been worse and will do me some good. Very nice morning for it.

WMOC is a place you see some people you haven't seen for a long time but one unexpected sighting yesterday was Eniko Fey, who I hadn't seen since 1996 (she now lives in Switzerland and her father was running). As those of a certain age will recall, she won three gold medals at JWOC 1996 but injured her knee in the closing stages of the relay, and has never run seriously since - one of the great lost talents of orienteering history. The most unfortunate thing about it is that it sounds like it was the sort of ACL tear that happens on an AFL field every second week; if she'd done it in Melbourne, reputedly the best place in the world to have your knee rebuilt, she would have been out for 12 months and then would most likely have made a full recovery. (It sounds like by the time it was properly diagnosed it was already too badly damaged to be able to be fixed properly),

WMOC long final, 37th. A very disappointing result from a disappointing run. Started off reasonably well - once again it was apparent that track running at all costs was the way to go. The first mistake was at 6, a short low-visibility leg to a small cliff. I thought I'd lost about 1.5 minutes there but it was more like 3. Settled a bit after that, but then smaller errors at 11 and 12 (11 mistaking an elephant track for a real one, 12 just careless) sent the run backwards again. The navigation was better after that, but I was struggling for strength in the soft ground by then and didn't have it in me to put up any sort of a fight when a pack came through at 19 - by then it was just a slog. Over the last few it was all I could do to keep up with one of the W35s.

About the only positive to be drawn from this dismal effort, something which belonged more to my sequence of less-than-stellar 1990s international performances, was that my Achilles lasted the distance, not something I was especially confident of in the warm-up.

Next stop is Norway but the racing is only a minor priority then; after that the next major target is the nationals week. I knew I wasn't going to repeat my 2009 result here, given the stronger field and my interrupted season - had been hoping for top 10 and would have been satisfied with top 20 (the edge of which is probably where I'd have been with a decent-but-not-brilliant run).

My swimming gear wasn't completely wasted luggage on this trip; Biel has a pool, and I was a bit stiff after the qualifiers and thought I could use this session. Felt rather out of practice and took a while to get into it, partly because the pool didn't have lane ropes and I wasn't sure what the local customs were (it soon became apparent that they were "pick a line that no-one else is using and people will stay out of your way").

The toenail that suffered fatal damage on the Wilsons Prom run in March finally gave up the ghost today, but I think what's underneath is now solid enough that it shouldn't give me any trouble. More concerning has been the tightness in my Achilles today. The last few days it hasn't been a major issue running but has taken the length of the walk to the station to loosen up in the morning; today it took most of the day.

Biel gets a less-than-glowing review in the Swiss Lonely Planet for its ugliness. I can only assume that the author turned right out of the station and the swimming pool building was the first thing he saw. The rest of the town is pleasant if unexciting, and because of its good transport links it's been a reasonable base for WMOC; the only negative is that no-one else I know is staying here. I have been trying to find out what has been going on with one of the big local news items, which was on the front page of the national tabloids for days: it involved the death of a young woman on the Bielersee after a boating incident, which as far as I can tell was a marine hit-and-run. Still not sure why it got so much national coverage unless either there is a severe shortage of news or either the victim or the alleged captain are famous for other reasons.

Spent the rest day afternoon wandering around Bern, a pleasant city. Most unexpected sight of the day was a flyer with a picture of none other than General Peter Cosgrove (standing in front of Australian flag). It turned out to contain a transcript of an ABC interview of his (as far as I can tell, about how shooting rabbits as a kid sparked an interest in a military career) and was being used in a campaign against tougher gun laws in Switzerland. I wonder if he knows about it?

Bern's football fans will have been happy after the local team, Young Boys Bern (quite a few Swiss teams have quirky English names, a legacy of Switzerland being the first place that the British exported organised football to), had a win in a Champions League qualifier last night against Turkey's Fenerbahce (a game which featured the rare event of someone being sent off for diving). Their home ground is in the suburb of Wankdorf; when their early-season home games were moved a few years back because of stadium building delays, Soccernet's headline was "Young Boys Wankdorf erection woe".

C • toenail 1

C • Headline 3

A strange sort of day, as a second qualifier can be. The word was that this area was pretty tough and this was borne out by the times of the early finishers (or lack thereof) on other courses. This settled me on an ultra-conservative race strategy on a day when avoiding disaster was the only thing that really mattered, using a lot of track options (where they existed) and generally being very cautious.

The strategy achieved its objective, particularly in the first half of the course where I was very clean indeed, without going flat out. Started to struggle a little for concentration in the third quarter, which was pretty thick and rocky without many track options - hesitated quite a bit but was still hitting the controls. My two mistakes, neither of them bigger than 15 seconds, were in the final loop at 22 and 25. Felt fairly tired by then but some of that may have been above the shoulders - had started to have enough of this by the last kilometre or two. I'd be interested to see how the splits from the first and second half compare, but no splits have (yet) appeared on the web; the final is, at least in part, on the other end of the same ridge as the first half which is one good omen.

Ended up 12th over the two days of qualifying, with a few having blowouts today (and sufficient DNFs today that someone who was a minute behind me yesterday was over 2 hours today, and still scraped in). Hard to know what to make of the results as you don't know who was trying how hard. The talk around is that ours is the easier heat, but the same things were said in 2008 and the results of the final disproved them (and 2008 winner Petri Noponen is in our heat, and not winning it). The other heat was significantly faster today, but this is an area where apparently slight differences in course structure can make a big difference to winning times through opening up (or closing down) track options. (It was certainly easier to qualify in our heat, thanks to all the DNFs).

The big question now for Friday is whether I have the ability to change gear from ultra-conservative to aggressive without coming unstuck. The last part of today's course didn't fill me with confidence on that score, but that area may not be representative of what we'll see in the final. (I may also be more aggressive on Friday towards human traffic jams, of which there were a few).

The starts were put back an hour today because of transport issues (mainly because the shuttle buses couldn't pass each other on the last part of the road up the hill, creating a bottleneck). They probably didn't need to go back as much as an hour but better to be safe than sorry. (We ended up about 20 minutes later than scheduled, not an unfamiliar experience for regular customers of CityRail/Metro/Connex). This did unsettle my routine a little (especially with respect to eating), although not as much as it did for people like Tracy who found herself with a 2.30 start.

If I was going to have a bad day this wasn't the worst day for it to happen, and it wasn't as if it was really that bad, but I will certainly want to do better than this on Friday. Dropped about 3 minutes over the course as a whole, mostly through carelessness in an often vague and flat area, and never really felt as if I had much running rhythm in the terrain, perhaps because most of the area was very soft underfoot. I've often struggled in flat terrain and hopefully the steeper country in the days ahead will be a bit more to my liking.

Last results I saw were 16th at the back of a close bunch, and 6 minutes down which is a bit closer than I thought I might have been with this run. Certainly in no danger of missing the cut barring disaster tomorrow. Achilles better than I thought it might have been given how it felt in the model events, but not a lot of strength climbing in soft ground.

At the sprint final our gathering place (although it wasn't entirely obvious from the outside) was next to the Nauchatel football stadium. It turned out that Neuchatel's footballers were having an interesting day on the road in Lucerne: 2-0 up after 60 minutes, they contrived to lose 4-2 and their coach was sent from the touchline for abusing the referee.

Original plan was to do the model event in the afternoon after spending the morning attending to laundry and other such mundane matters, but I quickly revised this after looking at the hourly forecasts on yr.no (an excellent site for Europe, and not bad for Australia either) and seeing that heavy rain was expected between 12 and 6. I didn't miss the rain altogether, but did get the run out of the way before most of the heavy falls arrived.

This was billed as the 'fast Jura', with the map having a fair bit of yellow. It wasn't as open as the map suggests and the white areas had fairly low visibility, but there was very little undergrowth and if tomorrow is similar it should be nice running. Pinpointing point features could be a challenge. The yellow is readable if one stays in control but mostly couldn't be used for relocation. Still not happy with the way the Achilles is handling climbing in soft ground, but tomorrow is likely to be flatter than today was which will defer the day of reckoning.

By the way, there was no repeat yesterday of the massive download queues of Saturday - for the simple reason that the organisers had replaced their own software with the SI software which takes about a quarter of the time to process each person.