Nordjysk 2-dages is the traditional season opening in Denmark, and usually offers good terrains and good courses for the o-hungry Danes, Norwegians and Swedes. This year wasn't a disappointment, and even though the wintercold came back to Denmark the week before, it was still a pleasure. The terrain varies between pretty dense and very contour-detailed areas, with slow runnability, but still very demanding, and more open flat areas. The course-setters had chosen to use the detailed areas with a lot of controlpicking, and slow speed, so the 13,5km on saturday took some time.
I was very excited to see the new map, because the earlier editions haven't been really good... But the new map was very good (most of the places), and I enjoyed running through the forest and being able to navigate from detail to detail, and really understand the map-maker. So I was just enjoying the terrain and courses all the way, and had some of the best o-experiences for a long time.
And was also excited about how my legs would react to some competitions, but after an easy nighttraining on friday, my legs felt good and I didn't feel any problems with my calfs.
Saturday was the long-distance, and I tried to focus on my controlpicking and mental state during the course, and wasn't pushing maximum, especially not in the end. Anyway, it wasn't possible to run fast in the detailed areas, and we didn't have much running on big tracks. It was really challenging most of the way but I had a good flow and was just picking control after control. I made a huge mistake on 25th, were I lost it getting in to the control, and lost 2½ minut trying to relocate again, but otherwise I just did small mistakes. I finished in 1h37min, and it was enough for a clear victory, with more than 11min! The others must have done a lot of mistakes...
Results here
On sunday it was middledistance, and I wanted to run competition speed, to challenge myself in this terrain. I had a good start, but out from control no.3, I had some problems passing a norwegian man in the dense vegetation, and asked him if he could move. As I passed him, he got very angry and sprinted after me, shouting, and I was afraid he would attack me. I totally lost my focus, and missed the control a bit. When I found the right one, I read the wrong number on my description, and searched around for another minute, before realising my mistake (1min45sek in total). It was a tough mental fight on the next controls to get the right focus back, but I managed to do it, and was running a really good race the rest of the way, except for a bad route out from no.13. The terrain from 10 - the finish, was so much fun and it was possible to be very offensive and still be in control of the orienteering. I won 20 out of 26 splits, and was only out of top3 on 2 splits (3 and 13). The results gave me another victory, with more than 6 minutes this time!
Results here
Tomorrow it's time for Danish Spring, and once again I don't know if I will be able to run full speed in the chasing start. I'll decide tomorrow morning when I have had another day of easy training and rest. On sunday I will definitely just be running easy in the relay.
It's annoying that my muscles can't tolerate much running right now, but I just have to accept, that the marathon 3 weeks ago, is still not gone from my body, and that it will take some time to get back in normal training without risking anything...
