A bit of orienteering and a lot of Track

Last weekend saw Christine and I meet up in Lucerne (I was in London that week and only came back Saturday morning) and head off for the local orienteering. It had been a rest week, but sleep had been hard to come by and getting up at 4 am to catch the 6 am flight didn't help matters. I had only run once that week and so I was hoping to be quite rested.

We were there well on time and I even decided to do a full tape. I've been concentrating a lot on getting some experience back, because running in Switzerland is a lot different to running in Austria. Doing some map analysis after each race has certainly helped, and I'm feeling confident once again in the forest. Additionally it was going to be a more or less flat run :)

I pushed from the go and maintained a high speed throughout the race. Not many errors, just one or two small route choices. I was getting closer to my OL running speed goal of 6 min per KM as well. Having said that I was way off the best time (a young man running in the HAM cat), but ended up as second in my class (so a good result). I was more than happy. It was good to get out there and feel good at an orienteering race again. I've entered for a few National events early October, so then I will be able to see where I really am. I will be hoping to land in the top 25 % of the results.

This week saw the start of the last push towards the marathon at the end of October. It's down to faster and harder sessions now. Monday saw 8 x 1000m and on Thursday I did a small but intensive pyramid.

The pyramid session is meant to harden you up, physically and mentally. Unfortunately it has been so long since I have run a 400m, I had just forgotten how to do it and ended up running the first 400m in 88 s, which was way too slow. The rest of the session went off OK but the last 400m was 76 s, which just shows me how slow I actually started.

As the marathon draws closer, I realise how little long jogs I have been doing and that I certainly don't have the distance in my legs anymore. I've only managed to get over 30km once this year so tomorrow I'll be attempting to do it a second time. Next weekend I'll try again, so maybe I'll be able to squeeze in 2 more before the marathon. As I don't want to waste all this training, I've started looking around for a spring marathon where I'm hoping I can build on this base.

If anybody has any suggestions, please let me have them :)

I'll be running the Willisauerlauf today, wish me luck. Maybe I'll write a race report ala Dion later tonight :)