Different challenges

The training has been working well most of the year. Very well, actually. Only a few short breaks from training since November. 4-5 days of little training due to sickness in January and 2-3 days of alternative training in February and March due to a painful rib and a twisted ankle. That's what to expect when you train hard.

My physical shape has improved during the spring according to the plan, and the last couple of weeks I have felt strong when running, both on the sprint and in the forest. But the first important sprint-competitions of the season (Danish Champs in Sprint and World Cup in Poland) haven't been giving good results for me. Way too many wrong routechoices and bad execution of the legs. It's been difficult for me to find the right balance in running fast and orienteering well. Simply too much focus on running fast. I can see on the splits from these competitions, that my speed is very good since I'm often amongst the fastest on the legs I execute well. But 45sec mistakes is not good enough to be where I want to be on the resultlist, as it has been so far this year.

On the Sprintrelay in Wroclaw I managed to change my focus more to the navigation-part, and did a decent performance in full control together with the rest of the front-group on the 2.leg. We finished in 3rd place, which was a good result for us with a new line-up.

And it seems like that I have now re-found my previous level on sprint. Even though I haven't competed since the World Cup, I have done well on the sprint-trainings in our EOC-camp in Czech Republic last week, beating the other Danes on most tranings, and generally doing good sprint-orientering. The training camp was a really tough one, with a lot of high-intensity training, as it was the last week with a big trainingload before 2 weeks of tapering before EOC. Actually I did 9 high-intensity trainings (competition-speed or higher) in the 8 days (including the 3 WC-races), besides some easy o-training. Maybe one of my toughest weeks of training ever.

When I look at my completed training the last 6 months and know how my shape normally develops in April and May it looks very promising towards EOC in only one week and WOC in August. I didn't get the best test in the World Cup, but luckily it's easier to adjust the technical shape than the physical shape in a short-term perspective.

And tomorrow I will travel to Falun and hopefully get some more self-confidence before EOC in 10mila. The date of 10mila is a actually a disaster this year because it is so close to EOC, and I guess that several of the best won't go because of that. But it is not often I have run 10mila in very good shape and well recovered as it is the case this year.
Because of EOC I have, however, taken some precautions this year, which is also why I will run an early leg (3rd), because I find it difficult to sleep before the race, but not after... The trip to Sweden will also be quite short this time. Travelling tomorrow, a short night training, a short easy training in Saturday, and then 10mila, before going back and sleep, and home on Sunday.
Our team (Pan Århus) is maybe not as strong as last year, because of some injuries and drop-outs, but we will begin the relay quite hard including Søren Bobach on "långa natten". Hopefully we can influence and dominate the relay from the beginning and far in the relay.