Week 15 + some words about my employment beside the sport

In week 15 I became Danish Nightorienteering Champ for the first time as a senior, and it was also announced that beside my aim for more medals, I'm now also leading a new project about ATK (age-related training koncept) in Danish Orienteering Federation.

 



After I finished my master-thesis in sportsscience in the spring of 2016 I have more or less just been running. In the autumn I was doing some applications of a PhD-project about performance enhancing approaches in orienteering and other endurance sports, but it have been difficult to get funding to the project so far. Somehow all the money go to sportsrelated health-projects and that is not my main interest.

Together with the Sports Manager and National Coach in DOF we decided that meanwhile this uncertain funding-process continues, I will start this new ATK-project up. It's a renewal of a 10-years old successfull project in DOF, and I'm looking forward to work with the development in Danish Orienteering.

The project will consist of a process of writing and publishing a book about all aspects of orienteering from childhood to junior (~8-20 years) and a longer phase of implementation of the content of the book in the clubs and in the educationprogram of coaches in DOF. It will be a very interesting and challenging project, but with my education, comprehensive experiences from a long career and my passion for orienteering, I hope that I can make a change.

We're still in the phase of defining the project, and next up will be some open meetings with the clubs in DOF, the first already this Saturday after the middle-distance at Danish Spring. The next after DM-sprint in April. I really hope that many clubs will use the opportunity to participate in these meetings as we're looking for as many inputs as possible, before starting the writing process. The ATK-project is targeting several of the the challenges and hurdles that the clubs in DOF are facing in their child/youth/junior-training, so hopefully these meetings will enlighten some things we haven't thought of.    

 

So far the employment with this project also fits well with my training, as I can plan my workload according to the trainingplans, and for me it's good to have something besides my training.

Some days ago I made some statistics about my winter-training so far, as it sometimes can be difficult to see how the training is going in a longer perspective than  a few weeks

 

The focus this winter has mostly been on high-volume training and running, combined with some high-intensity-training, but not much training with maximal intensity.

 

This figure shows that I have been training more than ever this winter (11,3%), and that running both in hours and km has been ~20% higher than last winter, which was the winter so far with most training and running. These kind of data is always nice to bring with you into the competition season, and give me confidence, that I'm on the right way to be able to perform well this year. It will be interesting to see if this increase in training and running will make a difference in the beginning of July in Estonia...