Wednesday 30 May 2012

Feeling happy


It's done now. Most of the basic training. June will include competing, peaking and further technical preparation. May was a good training month for me. In March I was still more focused on running and April involved slow and thorough adaptation to tougher terrains with various problems but May has been good and hopefully I'm now more ready to run faster also in terrain. I've trained my weaknesses and I've tried to do the best possible technical preparation in the prevailing circumstances. I've run two sprints, three prolonged sprints or so called urban events, six technical training sessions or events in tough, detailed terrains and two additional trainings in hilly, less detailed terrains. Most of them I've run at race pace or split them into intervals. It has worked fine and I'm quite happy with the past three weeks. 

Next I'm going to stay happy, give my tired legs a bit of rest and wait fitness to come out. My next Tour de Finland begins with SM-sprintti, continues with Tampere Games, and ends with Jukola. Looking forward to them all!

Here are a few of my recent maps and pics are from the same places. 









Monday 14 May 2012

EOC from the other side of the screen


I feel excited. I'm not even running there myself but I'm still quite excited about it. It's like WOC in Trondheim. Championships in beautiful Scandinavian terrain represent something special for me. Something you look forward to not only because it's a championship but also because you believe that it offers you something special. EOC2012 in fairytale forests of Dalarna is something I would really love to experience. But even on this side of the screen I feel quite excited. Excited to see the challenges Eva Jurenikova offers the other runners and excited to see how my fellow runners and teammates will do there.

In the meanwhile I've been trying to train hard myself to be better next time. So I've been orienteering in full speed and doing some strength training. I just spent an awesome weekend in Yorkshire Dales running first an urban event in Settle and Giggleswick, followed by a long distance in Klinsey North. It was a terrific weekend. Urban race served as excellent prolonged sprint training and Sunday's event in gorgeous limestone terrain offered adequately hills and details. First look on the map (see below) shocked me a bit but then I just started to run and got along well and really enjoyed it!








Monday 7 May 2012

Blicken framåt


My season start in Finland did not fulfil my expectations at any degree but gave me more time to prepare towards WOC. First of all it took me a more than a week to adapt to the Finnish weather and terrain, and secondly, my orienteering skills there were rusty. I was nevertheless happy to make progress during my stay and at the last selection race I finished 6th, only 22 seconds behind the winner. That was already much better than my first race.  Sprint appeared to be my best discipline at the moment in Finland and the only distance I could really run. Terrains for middle and long were too tough for me to run and my going there was far from fast. Compared to others I was really slow and inefficient in all tough and marshy parts but fast on the areas with better runability.

Of course it's shame to miss the EOC but on the other hand I have now more time to prepare for the World Cup and WOC. Swiss terrain should suit me a lot better than Finnish after training in similar kind of terrain for over a year now. But I also know now that I need to practise more in Scandinavian terrain to make it to the Finnish team. While I've been training towards international events in continental terrain I have neglected training in the Finnish terrain. I'm nevertheless very happy with my staying in Finland and all technical training I got to do during my stay. Now I have much more experience and I also know better which areas I still need to work on. I'm not giving up yet because I know I've trained well and I have much more to give than I've been able to show. Here's short description of my races.

Middle distance was actually technically quite simple but I imagined it more difficult and played safe. I didn't do any bigger mistakes, only a lot of hesitation and checking things a million times before proceeding. At the end of the race I realized that I've forgotten to run. I had been too focused on the map.  

Long was kind of a nightmare to me. It was so wet that it's hard to believe. After my first dip into ice-cold water on a tiny marsh in the beginning of the leg 2-3 I thought I was just having a bad dream. But the nightmare continued and continued and I never woke up. By the time I reached the 4th control my sense of humour was gone. I was frozen, unable to move my limbs and my left glute had stopped working. I ran really badly the long legs 2-3 and 7-8 losing minutes on both of them. Then I got confused of an open area just before control 16 and lost nearly 1,5 min there. After that I ran aggressively the last few legs but unfortunately the course ended just when I started to find a good rhythm. results

My glute was in pain already before the long race and stopped working totally after the race so I had no idea whether I could run the sprint only a few days later. But I did and did actually my best run there resultwise. I had three bad legs (1, 10, 12) where I lost about 10 sec on each but otherwise my run was pretty good. Because of mistakes it didn't give me a ticket to Sweden but at least it gave me some hope. resultsRouteGadget

Highlight of my Nordic O Tour was Tiomila. We had exactly the same team as last year, only in slightly mixed order. After running several times either 4th or 5th leg it was time to test the first leg. My job was to come with the main group and that's what I did. Unfortunately I'm too much of an individualist to settle to run with others, so I had to try to something else. Leg to my first control was really long and offered a tempting route choice along the road. I couldn't resist trying that even though none of the other top teams took the same route. A few girls came with me to the half way but jumped to the woods earlier whereas I continued a half kilometre longer. It was a strange feeling to run all alone so early on the course on the first leg. I felt confident but still somewhat excited about my route choice. I was hoping to be in the lead but when I approached the control I saw runners coming across from other forkings while I still had a way to go to mine. By the time I reached my control about a hundred girls had passed me. It was a hard blow but at least I had tried. Had I been alone I might have run faster but being stuck in the masses I just settled to run the same pace with people around me. There was a continuous queue of runners and it was hard to try to pass anyone. I had technically a clean run but changed 2,5 minutes behind the lead. Anni, Heidi, Saila and Venla did a superb job after me and we could celebrate an awesome 3rd place at the finish. tracking