Training Log Archive: W

Jogged over to Ladun Maija to renenact and orienteering course from a few weeks ago that I missed. There's actually some pretty nice terrain right there, but the map is super old and sucks. Made a quite a few mistakes because I prined the map off from routegadget which is also poor quality, and give there was no controls out, it was tough to find some stuff sometimes. Like pits. Tried to do a few of the legs quickly, as well, to get a bit of intensity in.

I find that in training, if there's nothing to find, like in this workout, I lose focus really easily and stop paying attention. It makes training like this super ineffective. Like, super ineffective. Like, why even do it? I just don't know how to switch my brain on effectively.

Was originally going to make this a trail tempo run, but I felt... ugh, so I didn't. However, once I got around to Vuorilampi, I felt good enough to go up to the top, and then single track it down to Killeri and hope. So, although I felt bad, I did a whole bunch of fun downhill single track which made my stomach stop gurgling. This running time used to get me 16.5k, but I seem to be slowing down.

And I can tell, I'm slowing down. And my legs hurt.

Back in Jyväskylä, however briefly, before heading off on a new adventure. Popped off for an evening run with a little bit extra single track than usual, to round it off to a perfect 10.0k. Good to know! If it were a wet day, my feet would definitely be wet in a few patches, but, it wasn't, so lovely day over al!

Middle F-final. Okay, B-final. But, I did so poorly in the Q that I started 6th. Say, maybe I could be first for a brief period! The first few controls went actually pretty well, and I soon picked up the Portugese guy ahead of me. And then the Slovakian. And then Irish guy. And then another guy. And.... well, that was it, there was one other fellow who start ahead of me who appears to have escaped, but I seemed to have picked up the entirety of the field ahead of me, which really threw me off, especially as we went through a fairly technical section.

After the longer leg which I got lucky on, it was just down to three of us, and we pretty much ran/worked together the rest of the time, since none of us seemed to be feeling all that fit and no one being to run away. At the 4th last control, I ran past it, and 5 seconds later, realized I couldn't recall if I'd punched or not, so I ran back. Then, just before the second to last control, I got a stick to the inside of my right eye. It kind of hurt, and I wobbled around a bit feel my eye to see if it was bleeding or not. I could still see just fine, it was just that general shock of almost poking my eye out. So I proceeded to make a mistake because I thought the guys ahead of me were making a mistake.

Blew it just enough to not come into the finish first, which was a bummer, but, just as much relief to go to the first aid tent and hear that they didn't see anything in my eye, and I just had a little cut on the lower part of my eyelid. Really close. TOO close.

*sigh* EOC middle.

Actually, to be fair, this wasn't so bad. Performance-wise, it sucked. I made a real dumb mistake on a downhill leg where I consciously changed my plan to a non-plan, which, to this moment, I'm uncertain why I did it. It was a steep downhill leg and I could have basically gone straight over the top of a hill and down the other side, but I decided the other side was rocky and slow so I'd go around the hill, but then naturally I lost track of my direction and I don't think I went far enough around the hill, doubled back, then had to go back to the top of the hill to re-group. 4 minute loss, total waste of time.

After that I didn't make any major mistakes, and actually felt like I was running okay and smoothly through the course, along with a Bulgarian. Its so weird, though, to think you're doing okay, and then look at the results and see you bled 20 seconds at every control. Even the 20 second ones controls.

So, although I was next to last place, yet again, I will remember this race for a few super fun downhill controls in wide open forest that I could just exictedly bound down the hill like nothing was going on. That part was great. I got lucky because only my course had that kind of leg. Really nice forest.

The ol' middle model. Kind of thick forest. Kind of rocky. Kind of a bunch of thorns in my foot. Ouch.

Ugh, the EOC long quali.

It didn't start off too bad, I felt good half way to number one, running through some lovely forest. But then the climbing really started in earnest, and I felt really tired by number 3. I then made a bad mistake at 7, and when the long leg to ?? came around, my energy was pretty much fully gone. There's like, "tired from the race and I can still push", and then there's "tired from life and I've literally got nothing", and that's what it felt like for the last half of the course.

Not really thinking straight, barely running straight, rather demoralized, already concluded I'm not running the B-final the next day. It was ugly. 35 minutes behind the eventual winner, I wasn't even that far behind Theirry in the WOC final in Scotland so... I can feel reasonably confident this was well beyond a bad race.

Maybe I could have taken a gel, but I feel this went way beyond something that could have been salvaged with just a gel. Oh well.

Lovely forest, though.

*sigh* EOC sprint qualifying. I could tell right from the start that my fitness wasn't going to be there, and my illness didn't help. I wanted to be at least smart and make effective decisions, and I didn't really do that either.

I don't know how much detail is worth going into for this race, it wasn't a very special sprint, nothing very exciting. By the middle of the race I had gone through the spectator control with the Dane I had started with, but the gas really ran out on one of the dull long legs, and I also made a mistake on this weird circular castle moat thing, where I thought the earth wall I was standing above was the impassable wall, so I stopped and stood there trying to figure out if I was allowed to cross or not. It took until I saw someone else crossing it that I realized it was an earth bank and thus totally crossable. Naturally, spending time on that made me miss the better route choice on the next leg as well. Way, way out of qualifying, and although I didn't expect to qualify, I thought I could have at least made it a better fight than that.

*sigh* EOC Sprint B-final. Well, slightly less of a sigh. Although I was no fitter than in the morning, this sprint was at least more fun. My brain didn't seem to be able to keep up very well, so I had quite a few stops and didn't take many ideal route choices. I even blew the ol' top of the wall/bottom of the wall conundrum, since I didn't look to see the position of the control and went to the bottom. It wasn't a huge loss of time, but something I haven't done in a while. It probably wasn't until 3/4 of the way through where I was really able to start being proactive in my orienteering and plan more. Things went a little smoother, but then I blew the route choice to the last control, which I think was a solid 10 second time loss.

Still, a vaguely respectable B-final result, I suppose. Tue was way ahead of everyone as he definitely should have been in the final. Don't quite know what happened to him, but in the Q, ol' Per Forsberg just wouldn't shut up about him... "now Lassen is in 12th place, NOW 14th!!, 15th!! 18th!! Oh, no, wait, Tim Robertson isn't European, SO 17th place!! BUT NOW HE'S 18th again!!!" It was weird.

Had a close call with a decorative stone square bench thing at one point, was reading my map, and only look up at the last second to not smash into it. Otherwise, shin destruction. But, leapt over it looking totally smooth as if I totally planned that.

"Yeah, its cool, no biggie, I always vault these things".

Long model at Bila Voda. Basically, big hills, white forest. Some rocks. Your standard Czech terrain. The forest is absoluetly fantastic, no doubt, and it seems like on some hills they're going real light on features. As in, its a completely white hill side with just contours. No lumps, bumps, rocks. Its sort of a blessing and a curse. No features to navigate off of, and not an excess of features.

Super fun to run down graduals hills, though!

And, still kind of sick.

The question was, go on a forest map or just do the sprint model and run slowly to try to continue to get over the cold? I chose the latter, and did a very lazy day of a short model map run followed by doing work the rest of the day. Emily still has not arrived.

In retrospect, it didn't really make a difference, guess I should have gone to the forest instead!

Thursday was a long travel day that started at 4:55, with a train to Helsinki. Then a flight to Riga, and then another flight to Prague. Then discover that Emily's flight has been delayed in various ridiculous ways (more on that on the HPP blog in a few days), and a subsequent drive to Jesenik by myself. Which was not wildly fun. Most exciting part was trying to go around Prague, and getting hopeless lost in that underground freeway. I accidentally went back and forth several times before just driving as long as i could on this freeway until I eventually saw a sign to hradec kralove. Eventually that happened and I was on my way.

A seemingly eternal time later I made it to a cute little down in some mini-mountains and my accommodation, and managed to pop out for a short down the road. I'm still battling this mini-cold, but my legs would have been pretty darn unhappy if I didn't at least go out and do something. And its a lovely evening here. Just lovely!

I was a little stupid at TioMila. After the race, I wanted to stick around and be able to see the rest of the race, which I did. I should have gone back to our accommodation right away, because it wasn't super warm out, and I had no way to shower. But, I figured if I completely changed, and I put on all 7 layers I brought (everything I could possibly put on) I would be alright. That clearly wasn't the case because I've been feeling a tad under the weather as if I've got a mini-cold. The symptoms are not too aggressive, but I wonder how long it will last. I'm keeping the exercise down because I figure at least being not sick next weekend is better than doing a few hard workouts. It makes me resigned to the fact that I don't think I'm going to have the results I'm hoping for (particularly, making the A-final in the sprint), but these things happen and Iäve clearly learned my lesson for next time (e.g. don't be stupid).

Although I'm way, way behind on logging, I thought I'd get to the meaty stuff now while its fresh in my mind.

Tiooooooo-mila. I had stated many months ago to the guys that I really wanted to run because it was in Falun and I wanted to see the famous stadium. I don't actually recall saying "and also run around the woods in the dark for as long as possible".

But, when I got the team list two weeks before the race, there it was, "Leg 4". Like you, I had to look up what leg 4 was. I was thinking "good gravy don't let it be the long night leg". I had just spent a week in Halden one month earlier flailing around hopelessly in the dark every night, and I regularly make 10 minute mistakes at Kurko cup, and I have definitely not run a night race of that length. And my head lamp is broken. And guess what leg I got!

I actually stayed up for an extra hour that night looking at the old map and pre-freaking out. I tried to give away the leg to anyone who could walk (though only half-seriously) because I was afraid of making regular mistakes and losing 40 minutes overall. The guys had this notion that our second team was going to be in the fight too, and so naturally I was super afraid of letting them down. As I got closer and closer, I wax expertly freaking out more and more, but also feeling more resolute. I couldn't sleep the day before much at all because I was super nervous about it, but more and more determined (possibly because there was no getting out of it now).

As the first few runners came in, it was quite clear we were nowhere near the front of group, which provided a little bit of relief, because I felt confident that anyone I was with I could definitely run with, and were hopefully strong night orienteers. I started around 12:35, feeling generally calm and surprisingly hopeful. I ran by myself for about..... 45 seconds, and then I could see people the entire rest of the race. No, that's not quite true, on the way to two I took a different ski trail and was maybe solo for another minute or so. I was caught by a pair of runners on my across the field to 2, and immediately linked up with them. One of them was running confidently, but I feel I took charge to three, because they were going too far left, and eventually they corrected towards me.

And then I went too far to the right on 3.

But, no matter, I actually corrected faster than them, and maybe it taught them to lead instead of follow me! The next leg, after three, was incredibly long, spanning the entire length of the map. They actually ran off quite quickly, and left me behind trying to find a route. I didn't want to lose their lights so I went hard to catch back up, and in the process completely lost track of where I was. The first half of the leg was leaping between ski trails, and so literally, for the first 2.5k of the leg, probably 15 minutes, whenever we were dead running, I had my map spread out trying to figure out where the bloody hell we were. Granted, we were all going to the same place, so its not a big deal, but its the principle of the matter. It wasn't until we linked up with another group of 3 (we're now up to 6, if you're counting, were they ahead of us or behind? Not sure) that I finally found a hill with a tower on it and figure out where we were. That was fortunate because shortly after we came to a trail junction, and I assumed we were turning right and going up the trail, but the three guys ahead of me just stopped, and I slammed right into the back of one of them.

So, all of sudden, I was leading again, because I was the only one who was paying attention, it seemed. But as we got to the top of the hill, I was still undecided on where to go, so I let up a little before the top and let someone be decisive. They decided to go straight towards the cliffs, so I shrugged and rolled with it. The control was ultimately easy to find, and then we had three that I just fully let whoever was at the front of the group take care of it. We were now up to 9 people in the group. Once we got to the second long leg, I paused briefly, found a route choice I was generally okay with (definitely not the one I would have chosen, in retrospect), and went in the same direction as anyone else. But then they ignored the trail and went somewhere else!!

Now, I really faced a conundrum here, go off on my own, or stick with the group. I went with the wimpy choice and stayed with the group, and we faffed around with a stupid, stupid route that made no sense and I still didn't have any idea where we were. I really just had to weigh the pros of going for it and maybe saving time or blowing it and losing the group all together and maybe bleeding time. So, dumb route choice it was. I suspect the guy in the lead made several mistakes and just kind of rolled with it because he knew no one else was paying attention. Maybe in the future with more courage I'll venture out on my own.

Once we hit the road, it was a straight run, some guys accelerated, and I was able to accelerate too, and hang with them fairly comfortably. This was another point where maybe I could have gone ahead, because at the next long leg we made what I thought was another dumb route choice with a road run, and then AGAIN on the long leg after that. But as the race got longer, I got more afraid of ruining my race. That's definitely a bad attitude, but it was going quite well so far and I didn't want to mess that up. After the third road run, I joined two other guys on a dumb route choice across the green, and once they got to this marsh, they both stopped and I took the lead briefly again, since I knew where I was.

Then it was the last few controls in the ski areas that were relatively easy, and our group returned back together and was up to about 12. The last 4 controls, being downhill and super easy, were just basically a battle of punching position, since everyone wanted to get in on about 3 SI-boxes. After being muscled out of the first two by guys who were literally just taking their hand and pushing my hand out of the way, I got some semblance of revenge back on the front three guys of the group when at the second to last control, they punched the ones on the high side of the exit, I sprinted to the lower side, punched, paused, braced myself, and they blindly turned and smashed straight into me.

It was basically a hockey hip check. That'll learn 'em.

Then it was the run into finish and.... really really pray I didn't mispunch. There were several times throughout the course that I realized I totally didn't remember if I punched the control or not. I remember several of the guys always let it beep twice, but sometimes I couldn't even remember if I did it once! Relief, I did actually punch, so, crisis averted.

As it turns out, I gained us 6 places, from 72nd to 66th. I was 45th overall on the leg, but still quite a distance back from the fastest time. I wouldn't have run that time if I had been fully by myself, though one could argue that I could might have run that time by myself because I would have made smarter route choices. Its really hard to say. But, given my low confidence level, I went into the race with the strategy of letting other people who were better navigators than I am to do a lot of the work and just hang on. The hanging on wasn't a problem, and I found a relatively competent group of guys. With more confidence I might have gone a bit slower out of the controls, made my own route choices, and occasionally pushed the pace in the forest and especially on the road. Do I want to do the long night again? Hard to say. I wouldn't mind trying to go first, or just being better and trying to hitch on to the first team.

In all, good times. I had fun. And only slept about 3 hours all weekend. Dead tired.

C • Long night train 3

Its been a crazy busy week, so didn't get to do much training, but I wanted to at least get out in the dark on the map right beside Tiomila to get a little bit of a sense of what I was getting into. The biggest concern was this mega rocky keski-suomi sidehill that was tough to navigate and tough to run. I was worried that the whole Tiomila Long Night was going to be like this. (it wasn't). Glad I went out, though, even if I didn't get to sleep until about 12, because it was a small confidence booster for the next day, since the terrain didn't seem quite so bad.

We definitely did not do any orienteering intervals on that map. Nosiree. No intervals there. I definitely didn't try to run with the guys and see if I can navigate at the same time only to discover I totally can't.

Nope, definitely didn't do that.

Well. That didn't go quite as well. Basically a long, long middle, since it was at 1:10000, had a gazillion controls and no route choice. "Go straight". I suppose it was only a matter of time for me to be able to keep this charade going where I can be flawless in my orienteering without a compass. I had one, but I've gotten out of the habit of using it, and the control where I really blew it, I should have just checked my direction with my compass. I tried to navigate using the edge of the vegetation (distinct boundary), but it was the wrong boundary. The one I saw was I don't think the right one, or even marked on the map, because it took me way left. Twice. I saw what was the green patch the control was in, but it didn't make any sense based on the direction I thought I went in.

The moral is, on short legs, you have to be a bit more careful and use your compass to check the direction before doing reading. Lesson learned.