Winter Training

With the winter festives nearly over, training is starting to build up again. I am now being coached by Klavs Madsen. He was previously in the Danish team and was national coach for the Danish team for some years, and has a phd in sports science.
I have a strength training program. I am training twice a week with OGF, the Odense athletics club, doing intervals and tempo runs. At the moment I am also doing long runs in nearby forests and terrain, and doing hill intervals. In January, as hunting season will be finished, I will start technical training once or twice weekly with Odense OK. I will also Travel to Århus once a month for relay trainings with my international club Pan Århus.
I will have a big program of races next year which I am looking forward to! With relays like Tiomila and Jukkola, the World games in Taiwan, and world cup races around Europe. I will post my race program on here later on.
The map here is from a training I ran with Tue Lassen, danish team member, on one of the training maps close to his family home. He was nearly 5 minutes faster than me with a perfect run. I was fairly pleased with my run, considering I made some careless mistakes (as you can see). Tue is in really good shape at the moment. It should be good to train together in Oslo if our plans to move there in August still go ahead.

Hillerød Sprint + Jættemilen

Sorry it took all week, but here's the maps from last weekend. The sprint was ok. I was going well until about the 10th control (except for a small mistake on the 3rd where I didn't see the gap in the hedge on my map). Then I started making lots of stupid mistakes. I wasn't really tired, I was just running faster than I could read my map. It was kind of good in a way, it was nice to start feeling fast again :) I ended up in 9th place just over a minute behind the winner. I won 8 splits and lost at least 90 seconds, so should have been able to win. Just have to slow it down slightly next time :)
Jættemilen was a mission. I had a disastrous start.. because I missed it!! I was in a long toilet queue, I wasn't prepared to run the 25.1km course without getting down to race weight first. When I got out of the toilet I had less than a minute to go up the hill and grab my compass and SI card then go to the start, clear and check and then begin! I had no chance. I started about 20-30sec after the mass start. I was nearly sprinting for the first 6 controls trying to catch the leaders. I got in sight but then started to die. I decided to relax and just run my own race. I was really concentrating on my orienteering. I was by myself from about the 15th control until the 50th. I even caught up a few of the leaders near the end. I was very happy with my run. 54 controls and I only made a few small mistakes. I got some cramp in the last 5km, but not as bad as usual. I finished in 8th place in 2hours 27min. The winner did 2hours 7min. So I was a bit behind. I think though that running by myself for that long and still doing 5min50sec/km is alright!
Sorry if the Jættemilen maps look a bit dodgy, I had put them on an angle and join the second ones together because they wouldn't fit in the scanner!

Update + some pics!

The last weeks training hasn't been the greatest. I had an unscheduled rest day on Tuesday when I was supposed to do intervals. I just felt too tired and the weather was a bit depressing. I think the hard training week in Hungary finally caught up with me :) I did manage to get a nice strength training session in though. It was much nicer being inside, it's pretty cold here now, but I know its only going to get worse. It's dark at 4.30pm which is going to make finding the motivation to train difficult in the next few months. I'm sure I'll manage :)
The photos here are from Hungary. The top one is the Uni Hotel which will be the accomodation for WOC next year. The rooms are pretty nice, much better than in Czech republic this year. There are nicer big rooms with double beds and leather lounge suite. There are also smaller rooms with 2 single beds, but theyre also an quite cozy. Next photo is just of some of the terrain. As you can see its very open with good visibility. I think come WOC time the visibility will be a little lower because the leaves will actually be on the trees. This will also make runability faster because you will be able to actually see those nasty little rocks, that are currently hidden under the leaves. The last photo is just a nice view of the finish from the long distance qualification race.
This weekend I've decided to have a crack at Jættemilen. It's a 25.1km mass start loops race, with common last loop. There's a good starting lineup as you can see: http://www.orientering.dk/ok%2D73/loeb/jm2008/
My plan is to stick it out with the leaders for as long as I can. If I don't have any problems with cramp then this should be to the end. If I do have to pull out it will be nice to get some relay practice under my belt. Ther is also a sprint in Hillerød on Saturday (the day before Jættemilen) with 1000kr for the winner. So hopefully I can pull out a good run :) The websites for Jattemilen and the sprint are:
http://www.orientering.dk/ok-73/loeb/jm2008
http://www.orientering.dk/fif/loeb/sprinten

Hungarian Training Camp 2008

I spent last week in the mountains near Miskolc in Hungary preparing for next years World Champs. I have recently been injured so planned to use the time to take it easy and learn as much as I can about the terrain. But as usual I pushed it a bit and ran most of the trainings quite hard. I was making quite a few stupid mistakes on what seemed like fairly simple terrain. I will put that down to the lack of orienteering in the last few months. I struggled alot with the uphill running, living on Fyn in Denmark is defnitely not the place to be to prepare for WOC next year. It is as flat as a pancake here and I have already noticed a loss of muscle mass and strength in my legs. I think I will have to put in some serious strength training untill Maja and myself can (hopefully) move to Oslo early next year. I think I will try and get to some terrain atleast once a week in an attempt to keep myself running strongly.
A couple of the maps here are from our trainings. As you can see its fairly steep. The light green is very runnable but the dark green is hell. Also I learnt that it pays to avoid the stony ground, it slows you down immensely. Tamas - Kut is from Bukkfensik Cup. Controls 2 and 21 were placed wrongly, as you can see I pretty much lost my head after number 2. I had about 7mins mistakes on the whole course... Pretty shocking really.
Silica - L'adnica was a training in Slovakia (just over the border from Hungary, so still pretty relevant). I only made a stupid mistake not checking my compass on number 4. I thought I just had to run along the track and into the second depression, but I didnt notice the small track on the map which actually continued on for longer than it looks like... What a sucker! However, it was my favourite map from all the trainings. You can run pretty straight, but all the rounded features make it easy to change direction without realising it, so you have to be good with your compass.
Miskolc - Tapolca and Berekalja were the 2 sprint trainings we did. They were set in the same style as the WOC sprints will be i.e. Starting in the forest and coming down into the town/park. I was focused on going hard in the terrain part of the course because I thought it would be my weakness, but really I had no mistakes. I could have had a better route choice on Berekalja from 4-5 , but generally I am running well on all the short legs. I was quite pleased. My main focus for 2009 WOC will be sprint, folled by middle and relay. Apparently the WOC sprints wont be quite as steep as the trainings, but still I was struggling a little on the hills. I will have to do alot of strength work and some hill intervals next year.
I am most likely not going to be running the long distance at WOC anymore, atleast not untill I have sorted out my problems with cramp and fatigue. The Bukkszentkereszt map shows all the fun I will be missing out on next year! haha! Its so steep. WOC final is reportedly going to be 19km next year... They are getting longer and steeper by the year!


Well, thats it for my first post on this blog... don't expect them all to be that long!