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.