Training Log Archive: jennycas

Arrived back in Trento about 9pm last night (glad I wasn't the person having to leave again @5am for Bulgaria as coach of the the Italian team for EYOC) and, hungry, wandered into the old town from the hostel and found "food truck city" which was basically about 10 vendors, so it was more of a village, but the smells were all mouth-watering. I settled on the paella from a Spanish van, and didn't really think when ordering sangria to drink with it, that this is basically wine...

Therefore getting going this morning was surprisingly difficult, but it was a lovely cool morning and I had brought with me a copy of the sprint relay map from WOC 2014, so I couldn't not go for a run around the old town (on an approximation of the men's course). Only one garden was locked; all the other little alleyways were still valid through routes and I enjoyed myself greatly. Less fun was trying to stuff all my gear properly into my big pack (70L is really only 57 when the attached daypack is 13) in order to catch a 9:15am bus to Innsbruck from where I'd booked a 12:17pm train to Wien. This all worked out ok, although I was a bit disappointed that the only way I could tell we'd crossed into Austria was the messages from Telstra!

C • Enjoy 1

Event: 5 days of Italy 2018
 

I took full advantage of the hotel's buffet breakfast before going off to climb mountains - up to Lago Malghette at 1900m (a beautiful little alpine lake where the rifugio is not just a hut, but a full-on restaurant) and then to the top of the Pradalago chairlift at 2109m, from which I could see across the valley to yesterday's training area and the big tent being set up for the arena on Groste for days 2 & 3 also at 2100m. It's impossible to describe just how beautiful it was being up in the mountains on a perfectly clear day, and I was sorry to go back down. Decided my knees wouldn't enjoy 550m descent and therefore, despite my fear of heights, took the chairlift - which was back down in Madonna di Campiglio approx 10 min later.

As a bonus, later in the day it was possible to take the cabinovia up to Passo Groste at 2440m, armed with a copy of the orienteering map and in the company of the mapper, with whom I debated which trees should have been individually mapped or not above the snowline. The actual orienteering event back down in the village was kind of an anticlimax - I had entered the long EOD course which was a bit bland but this didn't stop me from doing a couple of dumb things despite having previously walked around the village more than once. I certainly wasn't running very fast but did seem to have a bit of oxygen debt; hopefully more due to tired mountain-legs than general lack of fitness?

C • Bit of a wild thought 1

The 5-Days organisers had intended that the model event should be accessed by the chairlift which goes up to 2104m Monte Spinale from straight behind the event centre in Madonna di Campiglio, but of the 40+ chairlifts in this vicinity, only 3 are operating currently and that's not one of them. I was lucky enough to get a lift with some Finns via Stefanotaxi to the halfway point where I hid my gear behind a tree and hiked another vertical 300m up the ski run to the summit. Partway up, I began to hear cowbells, and the bovines were grazing all over the ski slope (with a guy and his 3 dogs sitting on a rock watching them) just like when Vanessa took me & G up to Schwialp in 2015!

The top part of this map, above the snowline, matches what the terrain will be like on Wed/Thur, but I'll be headed to Vienna by then, so it was lovely to get a chance to run in this terrain, even if I never got above a jog through the spongy rhododendrons and juniper, and the descent to the lower controls among the trees was a slippery slide (a bit of a chain of orienteers forming here and the people in front of me startled a big deer). Afterwards I sat on a rock in the sunshine and admired all the alpine flowers, So many things grow wild here which I would only ever see in a garden at home - ranunculus, forget-me-not, aquilegia.

Walked back to the town and was disappointed to find that nearly all the shops are closed over lunchtime, so I headed back to the hotel and made myself a cheese-and-jam sandwich! In the afternoon my tourguide took time out from his busy administrative schedule and we went to see a waterfall where snowmelt comes roaring down the cliff from a plateau above. Of course, it's not orienteering tourism without a map and so we critiqued the mapping from a previous event in this area. Also, I am usually a nervous passenger but I have been very good (by my standards anyway) about not panicking on narrow mountain roads or when there is a long tunnel. Maybe it's that my head is so weirded out already by being on the wrong side of the road...

Regional competition (approx 300 people) near the town of Fondo, north of Trento. When Stefano described the terrain to me he mentioned forest, contours and tracks, which I translated as "continental European" but actually it was really lovely, with some subtle bits, and if I'd been able to read the event info I would have realised even sooner that many of the tracks are verrrry indistinct at this time of year. Was nearly late for my start because the advertised 1.1km with 120m climb turned out to be more like 2.5km, but it was a good warmup. It also meant the course would have 200m descent, which my ankles weren't feeling too sure about.

Took the first control pretty carefully - a lot of people came unstuck here because it was up & over the hill - and proceeded to enjoy myself, because what can be better than orienteering in the Italian mountains in the summertime? Could tell that my sleep-deprived brain was becoming more vague as the course went on, though, and came completely unstuck when I encountered an unmapped fence around a small open area on a small hill, and couldn't work out the tracks in the vicinity especially when the small hill turned out to have a gravelled 'carpark' area below it and a door into the side of the hill! Followed the track downhill until something made sense, which conveniently turned out to be less than 100m from my control, but that was 4-5 min lost, and also very weird. Throughout the rest of the course I'd had a few small errors being slightly too high or low in the control circle, so feel that 56 min would have been a time I was happier with (M55's winning time for this course was 42 min), but it turned out that I was less than a minute behind the first W35 (there were only 4 of us).

It also turned out that there were presentations for all placegetters, so I won some cheese and a jar of cherry jam, with which I was very happy :)

Afterwards my tourguide took me to all the sights he'd taken the Uppills to last year: Monte Penegal for the view out over Bolzano, and Santuario di San Romedio which is a series of churches conglomerated on a rock spire, commemorating a 4-5th century 'hermit' who apparently tamed the local bears, and is commonly depicted leading one with a harness. I was fascinated, especially by the bones on display - have certainly never seen a relict of a saint before! It seems that people pray to him for family, judging by the number of baby photos and name-embroidered bibs and notes of gratitude upon the walls (I think this place would be a little sad for anyone who hadn't succeeded in having a baby or who had lost a child).

Now in Madonna di Campiglio, the event centre for the 5-Days and which is basically a ski village, brainchild of some Englishmen in about 1910 and which appears to have up to 100 hotels, most of them nearly empty because this is obviously not ski season and the summer holidays haven't started yet. Most of the hotels, including mine, are cuckoo-clock cute, which is a polite way of saying kitsch, but that doesn't make it a bad thing, and I do like the floral hanging baskets absolutely everywhere. Also the logo of the Dolomites World Heritage area is a bear and so even the street lamps and the footbridges have bear cutouts or stencils on them. And it doesn't seem to matter that I don't speak much Italian (can read slightly more) because everyone speaks some English, or, as happened to me in the supermarket, if I look blankly at them, they just repeat it in German! The northern part of Trentino-Alto Adige is also known as Sud Tirol and has changed hands between Italy and Austria a number of times over the centuries.

C • Go to Meran! I lived there ... 6

Adl 2200 Fri --> Dubai 0530 Sat
Dubai 0945 Sat --> Milan 1420 Sat
Oh, how I do wish I could actually sleep on planes...probably got a total of 30 min across both flights :(
So I was very careful not to be at all rushed or panicked or hungry for the next stage of the process which involved sequencing 3 trains:
- Malpensa airport train (definitely not an express, despite being badged as such) to Milan central station where I had just missed one train I wanted but there was another half an hour later and this gave me time to consume what was basically an espresso Paddle-Pop;
- Milan to Verona (the connection I wanted to Trento should have given me 11 min between trains but this one was 8 min late, and I hadn't bought a ticket for the next train yet because of this, so in the end I had to wait 2 hours for the next train but this did allow me to leave my pack at the station and walk as far as the inner city, which I would have loved to explore more. I found the Roman ruins, but didn't get to via Shakespeare);
- Verona to Trento which ran 20 min late by the time it got there but this was perfect timing for Stefano to pick me up on his way back from event setup for the 5-Days of Italy.
So I finally got to my hotel about 10pm, 34 hours after leaving home and a very long time since I had woken up at 6am Friday...

C • Epic, but not quite as epic 3

With Zara/Callum through Echo Tunnel, up past Lower Waterfall (sadly not falling) towards the fire tower then back down QJD. Was glad of a thermal top when crossing the golf course!