Portugal

Last week I was in Portugal for POM and a British team training camp. As usual the maps and courses were superb, and Portugal confirmed itself as a fantastic place for winter training.
POM was in general pretty open and rocky, with very detailed areas and some challenging route choices. I 'raced' two of the days, and took the other two very easily. I was happy with my performance on Day 1 (Although I was a little further behind Thierry than I would have liked), but my race on Day 3 was pretty bad, with a big mistake followed by a number of smaller ones after a really rather good start.

After POM we moved to the coast, to San Pedro de Moel. I hadn't been there for about 10 years, and it was good to be back. We did some hard training, including a lot of basic technique work and technical analysis, and some head to head running. Then it was time for MOC, racing in the sand dune terrain a little bit up the coast. My goal for the whole camp was the World Ranking Event long distance on the Saturday, and I was very pleased with my performance. My longest race for some time - since November 2011 at best guess - and I was happy with my physical shape, although my technique on 1:15,000 map clearly needs some work. I ended 10th, just over 5 minutes behind the best long distance runner in the world, but with more than 5 minutes mistakes and good splits for large chunks of the course. Good feedback for my preparations for WOC.

Maps here

New Zealand

Photo: Mike Pedley

Better late than never! I travelled to New Zealand over Christmas and New Year to compete in the first World Cup races of 2013. They were held on the North Island, around Wellington and Hawke's Bay. I ran well (better than expected) to finish 13th and 19th in the 'forest' races, and 28th in the sprint (although I took it easy in a challenging final to protect my calf injury). A pleasing start to the year. I also took part in Sprint the Bay and some pre-oceania races with various levels of success.

I combined the racing with travelling around the North Island with my girlfriend, and I would say that in the 6 weeks we were there, we pretty much covered the whole island! We travelled round in a camper van, ran up a lot of mountains, ate a lot of good food, enjoyed the hospitality of the locals and generally enjoyed the climate and environment.

A selection of my photos are available here, and all my maps are available here
Results from World Cup and Sprint the Bay

I would like to say thank you to Vårdlänken Bemanning och Rekrytering and Infanta Ribbåtar for supporting me financially on this trip.