Glas Tulaichean and Deeside Training

Towards the end of last week, Deeside experienced a bit of a heatwave. This was certainly noticeable lining up for the start of Glas Tulaichean uphill only race, but I thought nothing of it, and if anything, it would be good practice for the summer international's upcoming heat. However, I completely crumbled before even getting to the foot of the mountain. No idea what to put this down to but it's possible that I was quite dehydrated. However, more than likely, I had simply crashed after running a grueling 4 sessions in the last 8 days leading up to the race. Anyway, it was a good experience and two valuable lessons were learnt from it - hydration can be the difference between a good and bad race on hot days, and taper up for big races. Two obvious ideas but they have really made themselves clear with me in recent competitions.

After this, I decided to make the best use of the hot weather upper Deeside was experiencing and so I headed up the valley to camp and train for 2 nights. I found a great spot for the first night between Inver and Creag Choinnich.

River was great for dips post training.

Whilst out, I ran 4 tough orienteering sessions and 1 drills session. On the first night I headed out to Inver for some SlopeO. Started in some heavy heather which made running nearly impossible at times but it soon got better. However, it then got much worse when deep heather was coupled with nearly vertical slopes. I hated every step of it, but there's no denying it was an awesome area in some great weather. I eventually finished feeling very dehydro-ed and splashed about in some pools for a bit.

The next morning, I headed up to Creag Choinnich for a corridor. It really didn't go well and I really didn't drink enough water before heading out. A bit of a failure of a session. However, things got much better from here. At lunch I went for an easy run coupled with MM drills, and although I got a pretty bad nosebleed half way through, I was feeling much better and even found a mountain stream to drink out of before running back. I packed and moved myself to Ballater, where that evening I went for a long legs slopeO session in Pannanich. This was bound to be horrible but I felt much better and the terrain was amazing! Nearly broke my leg a few times on the slope to 4 but other than that I was feeling quite good. Poor height management to 5, but otherwise pretty safe and clean technically.

After a very nice evening of reading plus a chippy and a good sleep, I headed out to Craigendarroch for a final middle-style slopeO course. I started feeling good and was orienteering clean but soon hit a wall of heather and was forced down to a walk for quite a few controls. Eventually popped out of the heather but my legs were done. Crawled round the last few and headed home just as a thunderstorm was making an end to the heatwave. A good few days' work in the bag.

I then rested for a good 30 hours before a long session on Scolty on Wednesday. Found some very technical downhill MTB paths to practice technique on and a few steep climbs to try and match that of Switzerland. After an hour 'warming up' I headed into a Scolty Summer Series course which went very smoothly, aside from the fact that I was beginning to doze off physically after 90mins. No mistakes, but there wouldn't be an excuse for any in a fairly simple area like this. It was really nice having actual kites to look for after quite a few no flag sessions recently.

The optimum of course would be a combination of kites and intricate orienteering. Luckily that will come next week with a Middle distance near the Jukola area on Thursday and the real deal on Saturday night. Looking forward to really testing myself at both races, and hopefully some constructive results will come out of it. I will be tapering a lot more than I did before Tio in the hope to lower the chance of fading as hard as I did on the relay. Then it's only 3 weeks before JWOC and I can start really sharpening up. I've already planned a few good final sessions before this, including a CC on Glen Fearder which is just about as Swiss as you can get in Scotland.