Training Log Archive: graeme

Jukola Relay. Last leg.

After a couple of handover disasters we were in the mass start. Annoyingly I was far far away from a narrow gap on a short run out. The first couple of legs were also short, and all about traffic management. Longer leg to three meant I passed a few hundred guys and again going to six. But then I missed, correctly staying low into the technical area, but stupidly panicking after hitting a wrong control some 30m short of mine, and climbing up to rejoin the pack and visit their controls. 2-3 mins lost.

After that we went through a lot of grot, with heavy traffic on the elephant track and little chance to pass. Tried to stay calm and hope to pick it up later. Took a different route to 10, bit more track, which was probably good but again ran a little too fast and messed up in the circle, about another minute.

After that things opened up a bit, and I ran up the line hitting everything fairly cleanly. By 17 the race had broken into packs, and I had three or four goes at running off the front of one, running alone for a min or so
(except for the elephant track) then catching the next. On 22-23 I took a totally different route, which seemed good: I was with new people, then I took the same route as Thierry did to try to break Hubmann. Didn't work for me either :( I should have watched the trictrac!

Passed another dozen or so in the final km before unleashing the trademark sprint finish - I think only three people passed me on the run in, but from the mass start that probably didn't matter.

Overall, another very enjoyable experience. Would have been nice to have hit #6, but only losing a few mins is pretty good by my lights. Its only a couple of years since I spent 10mins on the wrong hill at Jukola - at least now I know that if there's nobody around, you've screwed up.

Official time was a couple of minutes long - I guess they add something for the section of run in the mass starters avoid.

Nopesport Team Banter finished 486th - everyone ran pretty clean. An excellent evening's entertainment.

C • A couple of minutes long 3

Ant Squire asked me to write a Jukola report for the club newsletter. I'll stick it on here too.
>
> Jukola is the London marathon of orienteering. A handful of teams
> locked in ferocious world-class competition, and tens of thousands
> other runners of all shapes and sizes. Everyone is in the same race,
> most facing an individual challenge a little beyond their normal and a
> team challenge of their own defining. And all involved in an
> all-night party of prerace and post race activity.
>
> This was my fifth visit, the "long day" leg twenty-one years after I
> first ran 18km of "long-night" with Petzl. A team rapidly put together
> on the orienteering chat website "nopesport". Our team challenge was
> to avoid the mass start, which went off two hours after the winners
> finished. After a disasterous 30mins mess up on the changeover this
> was always a tall order, and we missed it by just 5 mins. So off I
> went with almost thousand others.
>
> The orienteering is a curious mix of navigation and following. Tracks
> develop which are the fastest way through the woods, and its seldom a
> good plan to follow a different plan. Even for those without the mass
> start, there are always people around, but the mass start pack was
> another thing altogether. By halfway (8km) the line had gradually
> thinned out so there wasn't a continual stream of people. Most of the
> controls are common, so most of the time the stream was going the
> right way. But you never know when a split will come, so you have to
> stay in touch with the map. By the second half the field had thinned
> out a bit, and I was able to hop from one group to another with a bit
> of navigating alone, and with 2km to go I was at the head of a group
> thinking about the race to the finish. The pace hotted up
> significantly and four of us got to the final control together. So I
> unleashed the famous Graeme Ackland sprint finish, and they buggered
> off ahead of me. At least from the mass start the finish position
> doesn't apply to the team.
>
> As usual, the team had fairly clean runs. The top 30 or so teams
> have superstars, who run it on their own, but for the rest, its just a
> unique and great experience. When you look afterwards at the map, you
> can convince yourself that you're an orienteering superstar to have
> run hard in technical Scandinavian terrain with few errors.

Event: Jukola 2009
 

Trying to get motivated for Jukola on the training map. Felt lethargic, couldn't navigate and short of energy. Upside is that I felt like that the last two year too, and it meant nothing when the race started.

Run to Bath Uni and back to town in small gap between parents leaving and catching the train. Then fly to Tampere

Spare hour between examiners meeting and dinner - time to run some hill reps 5x2mins. Cold clearing up nicely

Run back from Bath Uni to Dukes Hotel via Bathhampton and the canal, after some faffing to find the path. Still full of cold, which the run didn't blow away. bleargh