Gypsy Glen and Scottish Champs

This week my aim was to get back into a nice pattern of training, sleeping, eating etc.. I was aware that 10mila had taken a lot out of me and for the first few days I felt lethargic in my training. Because of this, I decided to only have one high intensity session this week (before the Scottish Champs on the weekend) on Wednesday. Luckily, the Gypsy Glen hill race down in Peebles matched perfectly with my plan and so I chose to travel down to race that on Wednesday evening.

Gypsy Glen Hill Race

It had been warm and sunny all day and I was expecting to overheat at the race, even in just a vest. But by the time the race started I was soaked and it was still bucketing down with rain. Thankfully it was still warm or I would have completely froze... The race started at a good pace, and I led the pack round and out of the field, towards the hill. For 2km we tempoed along at a comfortable pace until hitting the steep climb up for the next mile. I slipped back into 3rd, chasing down James W and Gavin B, but keeping ahead of Espie, who I've never managed to beat. 

Ran the entirety of the climb and tried to make a move into 2nd on the top. However Gavin came straight past again and opened up a good gap. No worries, I decided to keep my ankle safe (had twisted it badly the day before) and focus on keeping ahead of Espie. Annoyingly had to pause to open 2 gates but I kept well ahead and even produced some pretty nice splits on the run back. Finished comfortably 3rd, with a decent session in the bag. All top 4 of us broke the record too so definitely not a slow race. Looking to do more of these in the preparation for the summer's races that will almost always involve some brutal climbs!

(too close to Gavin to get a stand alone picture)

Results

Scottish Long and Relay Championships

I always planned to race this weekend but I also planned to train through it like any other small event. Therefore the dilemma arose where I wanted to run hard and orienteer well, but I would almost certainly feel knackered before I had even started. This was even more of a problem with the climb involved - 460m in 8.2km for the Long - this would be steep even for a hill race. 

A good warm up and a positive state of mind was then pretty much all I could do without a taper in preparation for the Long. My goal was to be clean even if it meant taking things down a gear, but in the end though I lost at least 4mins and went and pretty much full capacity for the whole race. I took the win on M20 and was only beaten by 2mins to Harrison (M18), but I'm still very frustrated at my poor performance. I felt under pressure right from the start and took a poor bearing leading to a parallel error, losing 1 minute. I then regained focus though and had a really good middle section, only to catch up Will, red zone, and miss out on an obvious routechoice and mistake some white forest for LG... Really not good enough but at least it's pretty clear what I need to fix. Quite looking forward to doing so in the next few weeks when I'm back home in Deeside.

The relay on the following day went quite similarly. It was a brutal head to head race for the title with Nixon (FVO) on the last leg. I led the whole way but allowed a good 30s gap to escape half way round when I went too far into the red zone and didn't take a bearing properly. After this I could neither navigate nor stay on my feet very well. Legs were beginning to give in on any climb, but a final effort up to pre-warning at the end saved us the title and EUOC finished off the main relay season with a final win.

Some locally made cheese was a great prize, and some more time in Balmoral was always nice, but still not happy with my orienteering at all. Quite possibly a result of my orienteering neglect earlier in the year, which is now showing up as an absence of the essential skills that I seem to be missing whilst racing. However, at least there's still time to fix all this. No restraints from competitions for the next 4 weeks until Jukola means I can surely fix my technique in time for the summer.

10Mila 2016

A very long night....

Flew out on Thursday afternoon and met some of the TuMe boys in the airport, before driving over to Börlange, arriving late and heading pretty much straight to bed.

After a decent breakfast we headed out for some training on a similar area. I was aware that even though I would be night orienteering, it would be useful for me to get a feel for the terrain (and o-map, as it had been a few weeks since I had orienteered). This didn't go too smoothly at all and I was struggling both technically and physically, which then hit me mentally. Perhaps it was a high level of pollen that day, but I felt like I couldn't breathe heading up any big hills, very uncomfortable. This then hit me technically and I forgot how to orienteer, which began to make me worried about the following night's 16.6km night leg.

After this training I began to get quite annoyed at myself. Why hadn't I spent more time orienteering back home, or pushed for a day leg, or at least slowed things down in the training area so to not mess things up so easily? I calmed myself down knowing that the pressure of running in a team usually made me focus more, that pollen is less of an issue after rain and at night (and so my chest should be better) and that my leg was ungaffled (plus there was a good chance I'd be in a train).

That evening, after a confusing eating schedule, we hit some more training on a cool ski-slope area near the 10mila map. I headed out much more confident and orienteered much better. Not only that, but I felt 10x better physically and that gave myself a much needed confidence boost. Finished the training off by running down some slowly melting ski jumps and clambered into the bus to dig into a midnight dinner.

Slept in the next morning and had a chilled breakfast, before heading to Falun and having a massive Chinese lunch with the rest of the team. Watched the women's race but also tried to catch some Zs, which didn't go too well. Soon the evening came by, and after a weird dinner/breakfast meal, we were watching the start from the hotel. Spent some time chilling in the room before Doug headed out, and eventually Janis and myself were ready to go to the arena.

We arrived at the arena in a motivated state and began to do the usual pre-race routine. The mood was soon brought down a bit with our first team mispunching but I was still keen to head out and show the club what I could do. Felt relatively normal warming up and was pretty excited heading in to the box and getting ready to form a train. Erik soon came in about a minute down on a pack of about 5 so I set off and began the chase.

DOMA link

Set off up the hill to 1 and felt horrific. Assumed this was just the steep hill though and was soon heading north to 2 on a relatively flat track. Felt quite good and cruised with good pace to find the pack before we hit the field. We swerved left just before the control (saw a light, probably the camera) but soon corrected this and came into the control all together. The pack shot off about 45 degrees wrong to 3 though and I nipped in in front. However, I hadn't planned 4 all that much so we stood there for a moment in a panicked planning state,

The Lynx runner soon made a decision and we followed him out the control at a pretty severe angle to some tracks. This is where I began to feel awful. At first it felt like a sicky feeling, and I began to think how I could fix things. Lost touch with the map and decided to just trust the other guys. I began to fiddle with my spare torch round my stomach and transferred it to my wrist. This made a big difference but I was still not all that fresh. We crossed the drinks points eventually, I took some energy drink and felt a bit better, before swooping down to find 4. Except we had all made a parallel error and we were screwed. We followed some elephant tracks in unsuccessful desperation but soon I took charge to head down the hill to hit a big crag and relocate. Wasted approx. 6mins but could have been a lot more had the guys carried on their headless chicken approach to relocating..

I took the lead going down to the track but was soon overtaken by Lynx again. But this time I decided to break off and take a straighter route to 5 whilst the guys went round on a safer route. I knew I'd meet them again soon so took a bit of a break and walked up the hill to find them at the top again. I took charge again and hit 5 after a big, but safe, banana. Died a bit going up to 6 and took a gel. Felt the instant energy burst and kept in the pack well but then we were soon going straight to 9, much to my disappointment. This was definitely a poor route but no one in the pack seemed to realise. I didn't have the balls to split but looking back, I probably should have manned up.

This could have ended the race for me though, because once we eventually hit the track going to 9, my legs went totally flat and I really began to hit the wall. No amount of gels/drink seemed to help this and I was slowly dropped by the train, which was at about 15 people now. The faster guys broke off and I just about hung on to a few stragglers. However there was a long way to go and I began to worry about how I might end up finishing. Took a few good shortcuts to the later controls and my descending speed seemed to save me but eventually I trundled in to the finish 45s down on the back of the pack, thoroughly disappointed. Even though I lost 6 places, overall I pretty much maintained, due to the small gaps in the train that I was in for most of the race. However 6 minutes is a big loss and I can't even begin to imagine how much time I lost on the running side of the 20km leg.

Perhaps the best way to sum up my experience is that if the race was regular individual event, I would have retired by the 5km point. Didn't enjoy a single moment of it, which is a rarity.

Many things that my poor physical shape could be put down to, including:

• Eating prep. - (maybe ate too close to my start)
• Sleeping prep. - (not enough during the day?)
• Hayfever - (chest felt tight at times)
• Training load in the week leading up - (nothing to give in legs)
• Large concentration of effort at the start of the race to catch the pack (early burnout)

but whatever the reason it was my fault and I really should have run better with all the long runs I've put in in the months leading up to this. Hence I am quite annoyed, and even more so with the impression I gave TuMe. At least I can say I gave it my all, even though my all wasn't very much that night... The team went on to finish 72nd and I was 75th on the leg.

There seems to be a recent pattern that my races either go really well or really badly, no mediocre performances recently as of yet... Need to try and find what's governing my bad results now. Perhaps it's as simple as one of the above points, but there could be more to it than that, including things mental preparation. However, there's still a few races before the summer arrives to test things out and hopefully find a good routine where results sort themselves out. And with regards to TuMe representation, there's still Jukola to come, so hopefully I can prove myself there...

Start of Summer

My last exam has been and gone, and now I'm really looking forward to the next 4 months of stress-free life. In the past few weeks I struggled to combine the large quantity of revision that was required (for an unprepared, lazy student) and training but a recovery week after the busy few months of racing that there's already been really helped to keep things manageable. I picked up a few niggles; dodgy achilles, hip flexor, foot pains, that were almost all a result of over-building things but thankfully these all faded away after making themselves noticeable for a day or so. I was also weary of the increasing risk of illness with the stress that exams had brought, and furthermore with the fact that I haven't been ill for 4 months - a new PB. There was a period in the last week that my chest would feel cold out on any run but I soon realised that this was more than likely just the high pollen levels - the winds have since changed to coming off the coast and the chest problems have gone away. Clearly I've gotten away with it so far, and can now have a few days to relax before heading out to 10Mila on Thursday.

At Tio, I will be running 4th leg (long night, ungaffelled) for Turku-based, Turun Metsänkävijät 2nd team. This will be one of the toughest and longest races I have ever done, especially with the post-midnight start and night-orienteering challenges, so I am hoping for a nice train to keep things manageable. The competition terrain looks fairly comparable to something Scottish, and I'm looking forward to the big hills that will be unusual to most who have run Tio before. Long legs are a given too and it seems like it'll be the standard straight/round route-choice with hills and tracks involved. There is a very intricate bit on the bottom right hand side of the map that will likely be visited by longer courses. It's in bits like these that I'm happy my course won't be gaffelled!

I will be looking to make the most of my time in Dalarna too and will do some good night-o practice on Friday night as well as some light day training on Friday and Saturday. Coming home on Sunday night and I will have some time to relax in summertime Edinburgh before heading to the Scottish Champs and pre-Jwoc camp in Balmoral, one of the top areas in Britain. Very excited for that.

In the meantime I will be charging my headtorch, packing many many energy gels, and geeking the hell out of the Tio map before hopefully bashing out a respectable result come Saturday night.

New Blog and Summer Plans

This isn't my first attempt at having an online blog - outwith Attackpoint and other social media pages. All previous attempts at blogging have generally failed due to my laziness in updating..
My intention for this blog is to be able to share my long race reports and orienteering career highlights that won't bulk out my AP and allow me to focus more on training there. This should also be useful for me to look back and reflect on what was going well/not so well both in and out of competition season.

This will likely fall through within a couple of weeks but it's worth a shot anyway, and if it's going to motivate me towards my summer races then there really can't be any disadvantages.

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After a pretty successful start to the season, my summer orienteering schedule is beginning to form. I am disappointed with my results at both JWOC Long selection races as at the start of the season this was certainly my top priority. On both occasions I feel as if my physical preparations in the days leading up could have been better and my state of mind whilst racing was nowhere near where it needed to be. On both occasions I therefore was slow, made mistakes and on both occasions I trudged into the finish thinking of nasty things I could do to my map/splits as a way of expressing frustration.

However, luckily for me the Sprint and Middle selection races were very successful, especially seeing as how little I had been training for Sprint in the lead up to the events. I put these results down to a very relaxed pre-race mentality, a fairly solid speed endurance shape, and perhaps most importantly, a good geeking stint in the lead up to the races. My aim before the summer is to transfer this over to my Long discipline potential, and find out what else I was doing at these selection races, as well as BUCS and the two SOLs that have been gone well, so that I can go into the JWOC Long with confidence.

However, before JWOC there is a good few exciting races to focus on first. In a week's time I will be travelling to 10Mila in Falun for a few days of training and then the big night itself. No indications of my leg but I am excited to be running for Finnish club Turun Metsänkävijät's second team for my first time.

The following weekend holds the Scottish Championships in Balmoral forest, perhaps the most continental-relevant area in Britain. The big, intricate, rocky slopes and [hopefully] tricky routechoice legs will be good practice for the Swiss Alps. This will also be the training weekend for the JWOC/EYOC teams so there will be a good deal of team building/preparation going on. Sunday holds the Scottish Relay Championships where I hope EUOC can continue their successes at the British Champs and take home both Men's and Women's trophies.

After a few weeks of solid training, both in Edinburgh and at home, Jukola is the next event on my list. I plan to run for TuMe once more and also get a good few days of training out in Finland, preparing not only for this summer but also the next (JWOC 2017).

Approximately 2 weeks after Jukola, the team will fly out to JWOC where I will have 5 days to acclimatise (as best as I can (at ~1600m)) before the first race, the long distance. More on this to come.

After JWOC, I will join my family in Italy for some relaxation/light training before coming home and getting ready for Hungary.

At the start of August, I will be running for GBR again but this time at WUOC 2016 in Hungary. I will be running Long, Middle and Relay there, and hope to gain some valuable experience in competing against seniors before I step up to the big guns in 2018.

It gets a bit fuzzy now but after Hungary I will hopefully be heading over to Finland with a British Squad team to train for JWOC 2017.

Now that the main season is over I will be enjoying myself, doing some fun little races (including a vertical kilometer over in Glen Coe in September) but mainly recovering and preparing for the Junior European Cup in Scotland, the last big fixture of the year. I am really looking forward to racing an international field in my home country and hopefully showing them how its done in the Stirlingshire forests.

Before all this though, I have a few more final days of exams to get through. After this my entire focus will be on the summer - really looking forward to 10Mila now. Hopefully it will go as well as the British Relays did.