08 March 2009

Back in snowy Sweden

Finally I'm back home after more than 2 months away training in South Africa and England. It's good to be back, even if it means lots of running in the snow. I have got back into some really good technical training (some maps below), and some British juniors came out for a long weekend to get some experience in Scandinavia. As well as some tough orienteering training, we also had time to do some night sledging on the Lidingo ski slope and have a bit of a birthday party.

Last week I did an interview for an outdoor gear website, you can read it here.

Labyrinth Orienteering


This interesting sounding training was as complicated as it looked. 75 minutes to score as many points as possible, 1 point for a red control, 2 for blue, 3 for green. Double points if you are the first to a control (it was a mass start). Minus 1 point for each time you cross a 'wall', and for every minute late. I was RUBBISH. The map was old and the vegetation was out of date, but that is no excuse. I started really fast and made a huge parallel error trying to be the first to the green control. I crossed about 5 walls on the way there! After that was much better, once I had relocated, and I only touched a wall once by accident and once on purpose on the way back when I was running out of time.
Really cool training, but I was pathetically bad!

I ran this course from last years club night champs with Jonn Are, nice medium intensity training in quite an urban forest.



Today I ran in the Vinterserien race in Nacka - one of my favourite places to run in Stockholm. Really beautiful terrain, pretty nice course. I made one mistake at number 10 - the control was really tucked away and I ran right past it. Apart from that pretty happy.

4 comments:

gg said...

actually looking again at the track - i was worse than i thought! hit the walls loads of times

could be gps error though.... ;)

Anonymous said...

I thought your mistake would be going in the lake to 10 there GG but you're a rapid swimmer huh.

Anonymous said...

i recon the gps was a mistake :P looks realy cool tho, take it the colours show speed? Which version is that you have? I'll back youup that itws really hard to stick in the lines esp. when you could see a good route off going through lines

gg said...

When there is thick ice and snow on top, swimming is really fast and easy. Best route I reckon.

Garmin Forerunner 405, green is fast, red slow and so on, can change the settings for different speeds