Training Log Archive: Rosstopher

We can blame the 9 am start on Patrick, what an overachiever :) Sam and I ran over to the start of the OK Linné Backbanan hill training course and met up with Mari and Patrick for our inaugural run on this course.

Waking up and getting out the door was tough, and Sam was way more cheerful about things on the pleasant jog through the Stadsskogen. There are so many trails in the forest and without a map we certainly would have gotten a bit lost.

Started out with Patrick, a map of the course, and - as is my wont - much too quickly. The course is really cool; there is only one hill in Uppsala (this is exaggeration) and the course makes full use of the slopes. Much of the time you are running through the woods, just cutting up or down the hillside, but the course has been used so much that there are tiny paths on all of the ascents and descents. Still you need to have good eyes and a map to see where to cut into the woods from the trail. Patrick climbed the steep sandy slope much faster near the beginning of the course, but then he made a wrong turn and I didn't see him again for the rest of the course.

I was struggling to stay on course and to keep moving fast, but now that I'm done I want to try to improve my time. The club has a list of fastest times, all of them very impressive, but it hasn't been updated too recently. There are lists for multiple laps and we'll see if I can get close to the leaders on any of these courses :)

C • isn't it lovely? Was thinki... 10

Mari lives very close to the Backbanan, so we retired to her place for drinks and recovery.

Slight variation on the way home, we stopped by another Hittaut.nu post on the way home, just nearby to Mari's place. The map of all Uppsala is a very powerful thing :)

Night Orienteering! I feel like JJ's WHNO courses have prepared me well for this kind of race, but the terrain was pretty tricky. I meant to make the first control very easy, to ease myself into the course, but it was a tough control to make super easy. I was moving pretty hesitantly across the slopes until I got to the line of cliffs 200 meters short of the control, then I sped up a bit but ended up missing far to the right, and needing to correct. The next one was a lot better, and the third as well. stopped short on the 4th, and was just slow but able to stay in contact on the fifth. No real troubles until 12, when I decided to go out to the rough open field, but the field was awful running, head high with nettles and ferns with junk underneath, so I instead climbed back into the light green forests running parallel to the field, this made for a messy approach and not such a great attack on the control. Things went well up until the trail run in towards the finish, I over ran 18, and under ran 19... Oh well. I ended up a few minutes ahead of Patrick but behind all the other finishers. Not unhappy with the performance though, because it was hard and I'm still getting used to stuff here. I'll post map and results later, but now, bed!