I had some serious problems prior the races but I shouldn't have
let them affect my performances. However the fact that my back pain affected my
running disturbed my weak self-confidence and got me too worried to do my best.
I don't want to blame my back, because my speed was good enough for all races,
it was my head that wasn't alert enough. I'm still very angry to myself and
disappointed that I couldn’t do something that USED TO BE SO EASY. Naturally it
was a lot easier when I lived in Finland and could train in similar terrain but
I'm not going to blame West Midlands either for my dumbness. I'm sure I have
gained a lot of great qualities by training there. Qualities that just aren't
the most useful in the Finnish wilderness. Strange enough I felt more like home
on the pine-covered ridge of the middle distance than in the local economic
forest (typical Finnish term meaning that's it's horrible to run and contains
felling here and there) of the long distance. It used to be other way around.
I expected sprint to be tricky but I had no idea there would be so many controls in forest-like
milieu with poor visibility (or so many dense bushes). I ruined my chances
already on the first six controls where I kept missing the flags while standing
beside them. On controls 1, 3, and 4 I lost 25 secs in total and then another
24 secs on control 6. To 14th I took first a wrong route choice and then I even
punched a wrong control losing 26 secs. To 17th I ran left, losing 10 secs
there. Nearly 1.5 mins in total in a sprint is awfully lot. Results
On the middle I had quite a stable run apart from control 3. I came right towards it from the
re-entrant but didn't climb high enough. I had to go to the trail south of the
control to read myself in but I still couldn't find it straight away. It looks
simple on the map but the forest was dense and the stone was higher up on the
hillside than it looks. I lost nearly 2 mins there. I also had some small difficulties
with controls 7 and 8 but otherwise my run was good. Results
Long was the one I had waited the most but it didn't go too well. The flow was gone
and I felt I had lost touch to this kind of terrain. I just waited to get back
to the north side of the road as soon as possible. On the way to the first
control I couldn't distinguish anything on the map. I managed to go up between
the crags but once up on the hill it took ages (30 secs) to find the control.
Then it went well up to control 5, where I lost another half a minute or more
in the circle. Same again with 6. To 8 I just tried to get the speed up and forgot
to check the bearing, which cost me over a minute. I kept on doing these small
10-30 secs mistakes on almost every control but managed to keep it somehow somewhat
together up to control 14/17, a stupid easy knoll beside a trail but which I
though to be a re-entrant in the green. I shuffled up and down the re-entrant
unable to understand anything. When I finally after 2 mins search found the
flag I still didn't understand it. Even on the second try I didn't find it
straight a way. Still looking for a re-entrant. I just remembered that it
wasn't there where I thought it was but somewhere quite near. Only after the
race I was smart enough to check the descriptions. On the north side of the
road I didn't have any problems but my race was more or less over by then. Results
What's next? Well that's a great question with an easy
answer: Jukola. But what comes after Jukola is still a total question mark. Season
seems to be more or less over now for me. Three selection races and that's it. I
still have loads of unused motivation and energy for the next year so I intend
to keep myself fit and maybe I'll move to Finland before the home champs to
find my lost flow again. But before that I'll take a break from orienteering
and start to prepare myself for a marathon. That's something I've had in mind
for some years now but there's seldom been time for that. Initially I had
planned to do it after the season but now I might just start training for it a
couple of months earlier. So from now on this blog will be less serious and less
about orienteering and more about playful preparation for my first ever
marathon. And no, I'm not admitting to have any goal there. I'm just too fed up
with disappointments.
