Wouldn't it be great to have perfect training conditions every day all year around? To have endless beautiful and hilly woods and a wide selection of detailed maps around you, bright weather and 20 degrees, fancy recovery facilities, and a masseur on hand 24h 7 days a week. Sounds great but the reality is seldom like that. In reality you don't have access to those endless terrains, and if you happen to find some nice woods somewhere, you don't have a map or permission to go there. Then the weather, I'm not going to go into that. All I can say is that it's never as you plan. You may even try to optimize the odds by travelling somewhere far to find better conditions and then face a snowstorm somewhere it hasn't snowed for decades or encounter only burned forests in a place that was supposed be like a paradise. Then you will need some creativity to make up new plans.
Back in Finland I used to have near to perfect conditions with good access to several maps and terrains from April to October but then there was a five months' period with less perfect weather conditions. On the other hand, in England the weather conditions are most often pretty good (well at least relatively good) whereas the possibilities for technical training are somewhat less brilliant. I have followed the shocking weather reports from Finland the past weeks and I've been grateful for the conditions we've had here. I've missed a little cross-country skiing but on the other hand I've been happy to run in a snowless terrain. That's the way I thought it was. Finland has its four seasons, with pros and cons, England has only one.
However, you can never be sure. On Saturday we namely faced our first snowstorm here. It felt surreal. It can't be snowing! Oh yes it can. It snowed and it snowed, some 15cm (or should I say 6 inches) all in once and forced us to cancel all our plans for the weekend, as we couldn't get anywhere. We were stuck at home and watched spellbound the snowfall. I had planned to run an orienteering race on Sunday but had to come up with a new plan. On Saturday evening (after realizing that our plans of getting somewhere were totally disturbed) we just ran out delighted and played in the snow like children. I don't usually go that crazy about snow in Finland but here the situation is totally different as it is something extraordinary. When the world goes crazy what can you do? To make the best out of it. We surely did that. On Sunday I continued the madness by running xc in the deep wet snow as fast as I could trying to find the biggest snow banks and combined this with a mental map training. No I haven't gone mad, I was just having a great time out there!
