I left Uppsala with no sign of any injuries (part of the plan), but overtrained (not part of the plan) and headed to Fredrikstad in the south eastern corner of Norway, not far from where I stayed in Halden prior to WOC in 2016. WOC this year is being held in hills just north of Fredrikstad in terrain with some similarities to what was experienced in 2016. The terrain here is fairly typical for much of Norway and parts of Sweden. But while it isn’t especially unique, it is amazing for orienteering and very beautiful. They simply have so much incredible terrain here.
My purpose here was to get as much experience as possible in relevant terrain and pick the brains of local orienteers to learn the techniques they use to tackle the challenging navigation with such confidence. There were a number of other athletes here at the same time, including much of the Swedish and Norwegian national teams, making for the most valuable training opportunity I’ve ever had.
All up I did 8 orienteering sessions in 8 days. These are the sessions I did, the purpose of the sessions and what I learned from them.
Standard course: 10 km
The purpose of this session was to identify safe lines in the terrain and follow them to maximise my confidence as I become familiar with this new terrain.
I executed on this purpose really well for the first 7 controls and had fairly high confidence at this stage. On 8 I decided to take the difficult approach to make this training more technically demanding and screwed it. I was scratching my head for some time which left me a little frustrated. I just couldn’t make the contours fit! This was totally unnecessary and counter productive to the original purpose of the session. I took safe lines again for the next few legs before getting my confidence. The last third of the course didn’t feature as many choices and it was fairly obvious to go as straight as possible and visibility allowed it. I took the opportunity to run as straight as possible on a number of these legs and I had some good success.
Standard course: 7 km
The purpose of this session was one of concentration, a mental/emotional focus rather than a technical focus. The objective was to drive attention towards my navigation as much as possible, to develop better habits of more thorough planning and investing time into future planning. Success in this often comes in the form of knowing what is coming into view before it is visible.
I battled with my typical wavery attention throughout the course. The terrain was rough in parts and here my attention was additionally distributed to not hurting my still impinging left ankle. I become very distracted in these moments with thoughts of the 3-year battle it has been with this injury and the uncertainly of the future flooding my mind. You can see from my GPS that I lose direction in a number of places where I was distracted. Navigating with bad technique? No, I argue. Not navigating at all.
Middle Distance Simulation: 6 km
After two chances to calibrate my perception of the map, it was time to hit the terrain at speed. The purpose here was to navigate fast, using my pace as a forceful driver. I also wanted a reality check to inform my future self of my limitations. That is, how fast can I actually orienteer in this terrain safely. If I suck, I want to know that I suck before race day, so that I can strategize appropriately.
We had start times, pre-start, controls in the forest, emit timing, and live GPS tracking. I lost contact coming into control 1 which shook my confidence once again. I hit a small cliff that was unmapped, but misidentified it as the mapped one slightly further down the slope. This is reactive orienteering at its worst. The remedy, as far I understand it, is more confidence in my direction. I knew where I was a moment before I misidentified the unmapped small cliff, and if my direction was good, which it was, then I couldn’t possibly be at the mapped cliff. So I should have ignored it and held my line.
I made another mistake at 7 which really lost the race for me, though. I attacked a knoll on a vague hill with a bearing and missed, twice. The silver lining is that I was quick to acknowledge the failures and get back to where I last had contact quickly as opposed to messing around in this featureless area. This was a big time waster and I felt pretty helpless at the time. I could have taken a safer entry into the control and halved the length of the final bearing, but the local athletes didn’t so why should I? Do I just get pushed around by the terrain more? I need to run with someone behind me so they can shout at me in the moment when my direction changes. I’m simply not sure what I should have done differently on this one.
I got up to speed again, but my direction was a little off on a few other legs too. On these occasions the better visibility and greater number of distinctive features allowed me to pull myself back on target when I had to.
Control Picking: 5 km
The purpose of this course was to practise flowing in and out of controls. This involves developing a clear mental image of the features near the control, their proportions with respect to one another, and where EXACTLY the control will be placed, leaving no room for ambiguity.
I was mostly good on this exercise, and had a confident entrance into almost all the controls. I didn’t however have a confident exit out of many of them. Sometimes I would exit purely in the direction of the next control as per my compass. Classic sand dune habits from a life in Auckland. Not always great in terrain littered with impassable cliffs, though.
Long Distance Simulation: 15 km
There were three distinct purposes of this session: a physical purpose of grinding through soft terrain for over two hours; a technical purpose of finding reliable, safe lines in the complex terrain; and a mental purpose of using trigger words to drive my attention towards navigation from start to finish.
The session was a mixed bag for me, and I could talk about it for ages. I showed a new level of competence in places and in others I couldn’t even get the basics right, like navigating the right leg, or checking the compass when leaving a track into low visibility forest. I was also still very flat from my struggles in the previous week, but I was impressed with my endurance which saw my speed at the finish no slower than my speed at the start. The terrain was amazing and this full length simulation has made this the most prepared I have ever felt for WOC before. Perhaps that’s more reflective of the limitations of pursuing this sport from the wrong side of the world than anything.
Standard Courses: 8 km and 7 km
After dissecting the previous courses over and over with the Norwegians and watching enough GPS replays, I decided it was time to get into choosing the fastest routes in more physical terrain. This is different to choosing the safest line, although safe lines can often be run more confidently and therefore are often fastest.
There is no one size fits all here. I tried my best to weigh the pros and cons of different routes and pick the best option. At least, by this stage in the week, I knew what I was looking for. The marshes are predictably wet and slow for something so flat. The low visibility areas are almost always fast. Yea! Get this one! With the trees packed close together, there is neither heather nor blueberry bushes on the ground, only a thin bed of moss. So flat green areas are faster that flat white areas! I nabbed some photos from the internet to help show the terrain because I was too slack to take pictures from myself.
The hill tops and spurs feature areas of bare rock free of heather and blueberry bushes and the trees are much more spread out. These areas can be really fast, but there is a big exception. Areas of detail on hilltops, like small hills or knolls, indicate a broader trend that the rocky surface over the hilltop is more broken and will feature small rock faces. These mini cliffs, too small to map, will have you jumping up and down between the small bare rock hills and the heather-filled spaces in between. So smooth hilltops and spurs are the fastest parts in the terrain and detailed hill tops suck. With many hill tops in between there is an element of luck in choosing to go over or around.
The steep slopes are also a big red flag all over this terrain. These often feature cliffs as per the map and are very slow in any direction; up, down or contouring. Even without cliffs on the maps, the steeper slopes have many of the mini cliffs and also rock fragments on the ground. Combined with the blueberry bushes which cover all of the forest except the hill tops and marshes as mentioned above, the footing is poor on these slopes and they are best avoided. Some degree of reactive navigation is need on these slopes. If a gap in the rock rubble appears then is best just to take it, and take it quickly. I found myself improvising here more than anywhere else, but these areas rarely make part of the optimal route.
Long Intervals: 3 km x3
The purpose of this session was to apply thorough process under pressure. So, less about emphasising a specific technique and more about the discipline of taking the time to identifying the key features under physical stress and time pressure.
Intervals this long allow the course to present some challenging legs, while still being short enough to enable a very high speed. I was running at a touch over 6 minutes per km, and my navigating was getting crisp. I found myself using less features, but the features I was using were visible and the lines I followed were faster with easier footing. I noticed glimpses of being in the zone. That is, I was experiencing flow. I was operating at more of an emotional level, sensing my level of confidence, with habit driving much of my technique. My compass checking frequency was high and I found myself looking up and looking far more often, giving me more time to react to good and bad lines appearing in front of me.
This was the first time in this terrain that I felt this level of competence. A taste of unconscious competence. Just a nibble though, I dropped 30 seconds on one leg where I didn’t see a stepping stone and got a bit stressed about not knowing exactly where I was. I still maintained high speed, but the low confidence once again correlated with some hopeful grabbing at the terrain and ultimately I pulled up on a similar spur too high on a slope. It’s really hard to see where the root cause on this mistake was. I disregarded a catching feature close to the control in favour of making the map fit when it didn’t. It would have pulled me back on track, but maybe the prior stress of unexpectedly losing contact is the reason I’m not thinking clearly in the first place.
I have some hard thinking to do about exactly what needs to change, the specific technique or the process that drives attention onto implementing the techniques.
My time here in Europe was almost up, but I found one last Sunday to do a fasted long run. 3 hours this time, bringing the week up to 12 hours of running and seeing me emerge from my phase of fatigue. If in doubt, train it out? There is obviously a balance and overtraining is a real thing. I know, I’ve been there twice. I guess I’ve been through enough training blocks in my time to know when I’m chronically overtrained and when it’s just the ebb and flow of form. If I’m still sleeping really well and clear headed throughout the day, then it’s less likely to be chronic overtraining, which come bundled with these other symptoms.
So it’s back to New Zealand for me, with races my first weekend back! 11/10 motivation right now!