PWT China

Flying half way round the world, to a strange foreign land, for a week of sprint orienteering? Oh, go on then!

When the opportunity to visit Beijing for a series of PWT races including the Chinese Championships arose I grabbed it with both hands. These are the opportunities that serve as small rewards for the hard work of the last year, and hopefully act as an inspirational springboard for the winter of training ahead.

Having never been outside Europe I was excited by the prospect of my first proper jetlag to deal with. Once we arrived at our hotel I dealt with it the only way I know how – by going for a run. A short 30minute jog to explore the local area. We were staying on the campus of the “Beijing Sport University” which featured 3 outdoor athletics tracks, 12 basketball courts, beach volleyball, tennis, climbing walls plus loads of indoor facilities. The whole place was buzzing with people and energy with impromptu rollerblading classes happening in car parks. A little later Scott and BJ arrived and we went out for another run, this time to a park a mile down the road where we could do some orienteering training.

The next day was the Chinese Relay championships. Us Westerners were not allowed to take part, but as the area was the same as for the following days sprint race we were allowed to run a training course along side them. It was a strange park area built as part of the Olympics (but not used for any events as far as I’m aware). It was mostly flat with more lakes and bridges and lots of big tarmac paths. The strangest thing was that every lamppost on the bigger paths had a loudspeaker broadcasting from it! It varied from classical music to a disembodied voice telling you about the park but you could easily imagine it spouting communist propaganda. Very surreal!

Before the race the next day was a lavish opening ceremony for the championships. This involved lots of speeches and a flag ceremony.  The race itself was on the flatter part of the park and involved mostly running straight through mixed parkland. I started well and was in 3^rd place at the control before the spectator control but I rushed out of this one in the wrong direction and lost 15s and a bit of speed, eventually finishing 6^th, 40s behind Mattias Muller – very similar to WOC. Another promising result and a good experience to build on.

Inside the "Water Cube"

Before the second race of the trip we had some serious sightseeing to attend to. The “Summer Palace” was fairly unimpressive due to the thick smog (a theme of the first few days of the trip) but a trip to the Olympic venues of the Birds Nest stadium and the Water Cube was very nice. The atmosphere in the Water Cube was awesome, very relaxed with lots of video footage of the Olympics playing in the background. One of the highlights of the trip for me has to be going for a run on the Great Wall. It was snowing at the time so there were less tourists than there might have been at other times but we still got at least one “Run Forrest, Run” comment – no escaping them!

Race 2 was the Chinese middle distance championships in a forest park to the west of the city. My middle distance results have been fairly unspectacular this year, so I was just aiming for a clean run with this one. The area felt a bit like Spain, with lots of semi-open spur gully terrain and old farming terraces. I ran very cautiously, never pushing the pace which seemed to pay off – I only made one wobble in the circle and despite finishing 5 minutes behind Kvaal I finished in 7^th place as a lot of people made mistakes. This gained me 1 more WRE point than the sprint race so I guess it was an OK result!

The next day we spectated at the Chinese “100m orienteering” champs in the shadow of the Birds Nest stadium. The finals were 800m long, with a couple of butterflys and a 12 person mass start which made for some exciting racing. After the Chinese races we were asked to take part in a special “Elite” race which none of us were prepared for – we thought we were spending the day sightseeing so that was all the kit we had with us! However we quickly rolled up our jeans and stripped off the fleeces hats and gloves for the race. Nobody was taking it that seriously, but I’m going to forget that little detail as I beat Mattias, Kvaal and Scott to win my race!

The final race was a “PWT special” back at the Summer Palace we visited earlier in the week. This was a great little area of temples, rocky outcrops, hills and paths. My race didn’t go that well as I didn’t adapt to the non-ISSOM map very well, and I rushed some of the important route choices. It was the first “difficult” sprint race I’ve done for a while and it served me a lesson which I’ll have to learn this winter. Rasmus Djurhuus had a great race here to take the 500EURO prize from the big favourites. Ida Bobach completed a clean sweep of all the races in the womens tour.

After a final trip to the famous “Silk Market” and a great meal at a Thai restaurant owned by one of our hosts from Nordic Ways it was time for us each to head back West: inspired, enlightened and with more friends than we arrived with. We really were treated amazingly, from our hosts taking us to great restaurants to the endless stream of photos we posed for and autographs we gave to the Chinese juniors. Thanks to PWT, Nordic Ways and the Orienteering Association of China for giving us this wonderful opportunity!

More Photos.

XC Season kicks off & Pentland Skyline Record Attempt

For me the start of October means two things: the start of the Scottish Cross Country Season and the end of the hill running season. After a tough exam on Friday morning I was keen for some hard running to clear my mind, and I definitely got it with two very contrasting races over the weekend.

Saturday meant a trip back to my home terrain for the East of Scotland XC Relays. I really enjoy cross country racing and the relays are a great way to start the season. The course at Meadowmill isn’t the most inspiring with around two thirds of each 4km leg being on flat playing fields with the rest on a hard packed ploughed field but they are playing fields I know well as they are five minutes jog from my parent’s house. I’ve no idea how many laps of them I have run in my life but I doubt many people have run more!

I took on the second leg for HBT. Stevie Cairns ran well to come in 5^th and send me out about 100m down but only a couple of metres ahead of John Newsom of Central. I didn’t want to let John get on terms with me so I started pretty hard to try and build a gap. I glanced at my Garmin after 500m and saw I’d averaged 2:45/km so far! With a start that fast it was always going to hurt at some point but I managed to stay strong and pull us up a couple of places. My time of 12:11 for the 4.1km was the second fastest of the day but 20s down on Iain Donnan who flew round on last leg. A good start to the season though as last year I only ran 12:42 for the same course and still went on to win a couple of league races. The team finished well to come in 7^th: a decent result since we didn’t have a full strength squad out.

After the race it was back to a pasta feast to get fuelled up for the main target of the weekend: a crack at a fast time for the Pentland Skyline. The Skyline is an iconic race in these parts as it visits 14 of the Pentland Hills which we train on regularly. At 27km & nearly 1900m climb it’s also a real physical test.

Link to race map

Last year I ran the race as a hard training run and came 2^nd behind Oleg, who ran very well to get within 3 minutes of the record. The record is held by Andy Kitchin who has at various times in the past been my role model, rival, team mate, coach, team manager, landlord and even business partner. After we failed to beat his record for the highest place British team at Jukola I decided I wanted to have a serious crack at taking this record away for him and my surprise win at the Two Breweries a fortnight ago told me I was in decent shape and I had a chance of doing just that.

Bashing heather on Black Hill in glorious conditions last year. (c) ScottishHillRunners

Short version: well I won the race (just) with the second fastest time ever but almost 2 minutes behind Andy’s record.

Long version: unlike the Two Breweries I started hard. Within five minutes of the start I was up in the clouds and that continued for the next two hours – only a couple of times did we drop below the cloud line and be able to see more than 50m. This made the course a bit trickier and without significant local knowledge it would have been easy to go wrong – it seems several runners missed out some hills, hopefully accidentally! There was an unusual E/NE wind blowing down the course which was an assistance in the first half and may have helped my rapid opening pace. I’d plotted a rough schedule to get me inside the record and I reckoned I needed to pass the ‘half way’ checkpoint at the Drove Road in 77-78minutes. I got there in 74!

			Target	Actual	Even
1	Start
2	Caerketton	Hill	9.16	8.57	9.51
3	Allermuir	Hill	6.18	5.40	6.31
4	Castlelaw	Hill	7.30	7.10	7.43
5	Footbridge		9.36	8.35	9.36
6	Turnhouse	Hill	14.32	14.13	15.18
7	Carnethy	Hill	8.54	8.06	9.16
8	Scald	Law	9.30	9.06	9.52
9	South	Black	3.06	2.55	3.10
10	East	Kip	4.60	5.09	5.09
11	West	Kip	2.58	3.15	3.05
12	Drove	Road	1.48	1.42	1.48
13	Hare	Hill	9.48	9.06	9.57
14	Black	Hill	11.24	15.11	11.50
15	Bell's	Hill	12.30	14.12	12.52
16	Maiden’s	Cleugh	1.48	1.49	1.48
17	Harbour	Hill	3.41	3.33	3.53
18	Capelaw	Hill	7.08	7.54	7.22
19	Allermuir	Hill	6.18	7.59	6.31
20	Caerketton	Hill	5.22	6.01	5.29
21	Finish		3.36	4.01	3.36

(Formatting seems to be a bit out of line: red = slower than target pace (2:20), green = quicker than even pace.)

I met Oleg on the Drove Road and said “This could get messy”, meaning that either my legs were going to fall off or I was going to keep it up and obliterate the record. Unfortunately the former came to pass! I ran Hare Hill with Oleg and then followed him down towards the Green Cleugh but got a bit lost here and had to double back through some bracken – probably 20s lost. He turned back towards his bike down at the Howe and left me to battle on up Black Hill with the comforting advice of “Fight on the next two hills then you’re on the home straight!”. Unfortunately at this point someone stole my quads and replaced them with lumps of wood. It wasn’t obvious I was going slower but the hill seemed to take a long time – not helped by the 10m visibility – and by the top I had lost all the advantage I had on the Drove Road. After that though the climb up Bell’s Hill definitely felt slow though and I had to stop and walk for the first time on the steepest bit. I could still run quickly on the descents but on the climbs my legs, and quads in particular, were very fatigued and couldn’t pick the pace up at all.

Struggling out of the mist up Capelaw. All form gone. (c) ScottishHillRunners 

I was pretty sure the record was beyond me but I fought on regardless. Capelaw seemed to have got steeper than any time I’ve run up it before but I told myself “I’ve never needed to walk up it in training so I didn’t need to walk up it in the race”. That logic didn’t work on Allermuir though and I was reduced to power walking past Oleg, Morag and Pete and Jase, Janine and little Matthew (top support though!). From there it really was the home straight and I still had half an eye on the watch... still under 2:20 approaching the final summit... where is the summit? There’s a cairn here somewhere... finally, there it is. 2:20:40, can I drop to the bottom in 2 minutes? Let’s try!

Sadly (and unsurprisingly) I failed. Kitch’s time passed just as I reached the top of the ski slope. I felt OK running down the last grassy slope but spectators later told me I was clearly pretty exhausted. I collapsed in a heap until Al Anthony appeared less than a minute and a half down, well inside his previous PB. I hadn’t seen him since half way up the first hill, so he’d obviously run a far more evenly paced race than me!

In the end it was pretty satisfying to get so close to the record. Conditions were far from perfect and there were a couple of navigational wobbles. Andy ran a 2:24 before he ran 2:22 so I’ll definitely be back for another crack at it in the future. The great man himself finished not long after me, two seconds outside his target of 2:45. He really is the beast of the Pentlands.

WOC Report

Here is an article I've just written about WOC for the Interlopers club newsletter. Enjoy!

"Sometimes it's good to just take each race as it comes, judging each on it's own merits and not worry about the big picture. There will be good ones and bad ones but you'll forget about the bad ones and enjoy the good ones. That's pretty much how I approached my sports (o, xc, road & hill running) for a few years after graduating. That's fine for a while, but I've come to realise it can be even more fun to have one goal, one project, one target: one chance to get it right!

This year that project was the Sprint Distance at the World Championships in Trondheim. It started 25 months earlier, when I visited Trondheim on holiday and realised that running a city centre championship sprint race in a city with possibly the highest population density of orienteers would be a fantastic experience. The project came to a conclusion at 15:08 on the 8th of August, when I was standing at the top of a start ramp in the middle of the main square in Trondheim, trying to block out the crowds, commentary, TV cameras and big screens and focus on the challenges that were coming in the next 16 minutes - 16 minutes during which I would have the make decisions which could define my year, and where one lapse in concentration could "waste" months of preparation.

Actually I was quite relaxed.  My main worry coming into the race had been the qualification round earlier in the day, rather than the final. While the final was all urban and parkland, the map of the qualification area was mostly forest and the course had the potential to be "proper" Norwegian orienteering. That's fine, but it wouldn't play to my strengths - the flat speed which has been finely honed on the meadows for the last 10 years! If I could get through the qualification I knew I could give it my best shot in the final and be happy with whatever result I came away with - I just wanted that chance to shine. As it turned out though the qualification was much more "parky" than expected, with only a few legs in the forest and even they had options to escape to a road and then dive back in. So I qualified reasonably comfortably: 5th in my heat (15 go through), 40s behind Muller of Switzerland and 1 minute ahead of the 15th guy. The other Brits did well to qualify 6/6 with the highlight being Scott in 2nd place in his heat.

Beep beep BEEP and through the start gate, grab the map and we're off. 20m to the start kite to sort out the first route - three alleyways to choose from! Left looks good, past the last couple of controls, lets go. I'll admit I might have started a bit fast - adrenaline is a crazy thing - and i was in 2nd place at the first control. From there it was across the river and a couple of route choice legs up the hill to the fortress. There was a TV control in the fortress and afterward people commented on how slowly it looked like we were going there - if you'd just run up that hill you would know why! I was in such a state of oxygen debt that I made a couple of wobbles here, I almost ran into an OOB area and then on exiting the fortress I made a 90° error. In my defense, on the leg out of the fortress we had to make six 90° left hand turns and I just lost count! Fortunately these mistakes cost me less than 10s each, but little wobbles like that really add up in elite sprint racing. From there it was a fast downhill through the park around the fortress and then more route choices through the town back to the finish. There were a couple more wobbles, missed shortcuts but still nothing major. Crossing back over the river it was clear it was easy to the finish so I could really turn the speed on and "leave it all on the course".

I crossed the line in 8th place. A quick bit of mental arithmetic (once I got my breath back!) told me that meant the worst I could finish was 23rd which was satisfying. In the end it was 18th, 5 seconds behind top Brit GG, 16 seconds away from the top 10 and 44 from gold - in sprint racing the margins are frustratingly tight. While I probably couldn't have challenged for the win this year (or even the podium, as 7th place was only 7s behind!) it was clear that there are areas i can improve on in the future. Within minutes of crossing the line I was already setting my goals for next year!

Unfortunately for Scott, he lived up to his old Interlopers nickname of "Muppet Fraser" by running right past a control while on his way to a top 10 result. He got over it quickly though by taking 6th place in the Long distance a few days later (GBRs best ever male long distance result) and then anchoring the relay team to 4th, just 10m behind the bronze medal. Watching those races unfold was probably the (non-racing) highlight of the week for me, it was seriously nail-biting stuff and incredibly inspirational. Replacing Jon Duncan, who ran his last WOC this year, in the relay team is now on my "to do" list! 

All in all it was a very satisfying conclusion to a two year long project. I had one chance and I achieved my goal - a clean fast run. I learnt a lot and I'm looking forward to building on that in the French Alps at WOC2011."

MurrayStraining blog is back! Well it will be soon. In the mean time, I thought I would pick it up where I left off with an updated list of pbs. Not that anyone will be interested, of course.

100m - 11.8 (EUAC freshers comp, meadowbank, Oct 2004)
800m - 2:15 (EUAC freshers comp, meadowbank, Oct 2004)
1 mile - 4:28 (Sri Chinmoy 3x1 relay, meadows, July 2009)
3000m - 8:56 (Freshers Match, Kelvin Hall, Nov 2006)
2 mile - 9:28 (Sri Chinmoy, Meadows, May 2010)
5000m track - 15:09 (Scottish Champs, Pitreavie, July 2010)
5km road - 14:38 (Blackburn, July 2010)
5 mile - 24:58 (KB5, March 2010)
10000m track - 31:07 (Meadowbank, June 2010)
10km road - 31:35 (Musselburgh 10k,July 2010)
+31:36 @ Dunfermline 05/10 & Parkrun 04/10.
10mile road - 56:10 hilly and skiing previous day (KB10, Blackford, Feb2005) .
1/2 marathon - 72:53 (Dunfermline, May 2008)


Full bloggage will recommence shortly.