Flogged by Feebling Fever

After months of training in this ridiculously cold, wet weather, I finally got beaten down. I guess you could say I'm 'under the weather', but that doesn't really make sense. Being under the weather is what made me sick.. now I'm indoors wrapped up trying to get rid of this cold. So it would make more sense to say I'm feeling 'stuck under a roof'. Meh...
Training was going very well, but nothing lasts forever. I was sick all of last week, I skipped both of my interval sessions and just jogged instead. I was feeling better on Saturday so decided to do a long distance race on Sunday. The race went pretty well, apart from some silly mistakes. Running-wise it was fine, 2hrs 8min in heavy moor-land with no cramps is a satisfying run for me :) Unfortunately, despite being wrapped up in layers of thermals and with gloves the 2 hours in the cold wet seemed to get the best of me. Monday I felt worse than I had felt the whole previous week - rest day 1. Again I had to skip my intervals on tuesday - rest day 2. Today my throat is not sore and I feel less congested, I will try for an easy 60-90min jog and some strength training, depending on how I feel. It's very important not to overtrain myself, especially when the season hasn't even started. I'm disappointed that I won't be 100% for the training camp (Pan-pop tour) this weekend, but I should be back on track for my WRE in Spain in a couple of weeks. This is much more important. So it looks like this will be an easy week of eating healthily, relaxing and chomping down some of the health pills sent to me by my loving parents. :D

More Winter Trainings :)

Training is going well now. Im already starting to feel stronger and faster :D The local clubs have been taking turns at organising trainings every Saturday. There was an interesting one that you can see on the 'onsebakker' map. It was designed to help practicing planning ahead. There were several 'big' controls containing several little controls. You had to do the big controls in order, but you could take the smaller controls in any order you liked. It was a fun change, and I did find it really useful with my planning. The map without the title on it is 'Lungebjerge'. Maja and I went there for a training run on my birthday. I ran an old course of Klavs's as you can see. It was a really nice area, the forest was quite open so it was much faster than most of the other maps on Fyn. It was also sandy as opposed to the traditional 'mudbath' type maps around Odense. We will be organising a B grade event on this map in April. On a lighter note (or should I say heavier?) my body weight seems to have increased dramitically since the end of last season. Then I had an all time low of just under 60kg. Now I am bouncing around the forrest at a whopping 67kg. I can't seem to find and visible signs of chunkiness, perhaps gravity is just a bit angry at me :S I will be able to have a nice little break from all of these cold winter trainings in about 3 weeks time. Maja and I will head to Alicante in Spain (where I had JWOC in 2002). And by 'nice little break' I meant an intensive week long training camp with 2 trainings per day and a world ranking long distance event. The WRE will also double as one of my 'trial' runs because I will not make it back to NZ this year for the actual trial races. One of the main camp coaches will be Mats Troeng (a member of the Swedish national team). The 2x trainings a day and lectures at night should give me a good oing boost before coming into the next season :P You can read more about the camp and see some pics and maps of the terrain here: http://www.o-travel.com/traningscamp_alicante_en.htm