Training Log Archive: BorisGr

Jogging to the start - probably one of the roughest start jogs i've ever had, through feled areas and all sorts of crap. Don't know how the old people even mde it to the start. :)

Roslagen week-end classic race. This is the first hot day of the year, and I sure felt it. Started out very confused, as I stood at the strart triangle trying to find the triangle on the map for like 15 seconds before realizing the course went on both sides of the map and I needed to flip. In general, I wanted to keep a nice, steady pace and had as my not-too-important goals finishing in the top 20 and being less then 25% behind the winner. Well, I made a mistake right off the bat on number 2. We had a longish leg with a stretch of technical swamp/small island terrain (just like Lunsen, only at 1:15) with a control on a boulder. I came right to the boulder, didnt see the control, saw another control literally 10 meters away (that was our #11 - on the other side of the map) and panicked, thinking i had to be in the wrong spot, since there couldn't be two controls so close. Ended up losing two minutes or so. Grrr. Made another mistake right after we had to flip the map - by the time i figured out where on the map i was, i had already gone 20 or so meters in the wrong direction and never adjusted. Otherwise, i had no major mistakes, but continuing annoying problems in the control circle - 15 seconds here, 30 seconds there... On the whole, i managed to keep a pretty constant pace throughout, which is always nice for such a long race and was pretty happy with my route choices, but still was too tentative in the woods and never really attacked the course for fear (probably justified) of screwing up. Anyway, i ended up 20th, but that wasn't as pleasant as I had thought, as only 27 finished and 10 guys DNF'ed, probably because of the heat and long course. I was 23 minutes (30%) behind the winner (results at http://www.svenskidrott.se/Organisation.asp?WCI=wi...), which is a lot, and I was quite disappointed until I got home and looked at the last time I ran a classic race of comparable length in comparable terrain, which was the classic DM when I first got here in august, and saw that I was 49 minutes back of the winner (>50%) and 46 minutes behind today's winner. So at least there seems to be progress. At any rate, compared with when i first came here, I feel a lot more confident navigating here and actually believe that i will find the controls, which is more than i could say last August.

I walked home from the clubhouse on this perfect summer-like day and realized that i never really appreciated the sun as much until i came to Sweden. I mean, everyone is outside today, working, playing sports, relaxing, everyone is in a good mood, smiling - people are so happy to have a nice long sunny day, which is something i often took for granted in new york. Kind of cool.