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