Hi there and welcome to the new season 2020! I’ve been very excited to start it and see how it goes after actually running the whole winter (I’d never had such a winter before). Now behind my back already is the first training camp of this year - half a month in Turkey with EON orienteering, and it was everything I dreamed of: +20 and sea with snowy mountains on the horizon, technical terrains and sprints in ruins of ancient towns. Not only I saw a big progress in my running capacity after working hard on it for several months in Sweden, but also got needed for JWOC confidence and built myself a concept of ideas, skills and tips for orienteering in tricky Turkish forests.
In exactly two weeks I have had 23 orienteering technique trainings, ran 200 km in sum, climbed more than 6000 metres and felt thousands of positive emotions. Have a look at all the maps with routes in my maps archive: maps.o-stuff.net. More important than numbers are the conclusions I made for myself during the camp, which I will definitely use when competing in Turkey in July. Do you make terrain conclusions? Do you write them down to reread before the actual races? I have never done it before and now I feel as a preliminary school pupil, writing down everything after teacher, being afraid to miss each letter, huh. And wow, it feels so good to have this strategy or system you have built in a note, it is like a plan you will just perform, a strict algorithm. Of course, orienteering is way more challenging than just a list of steps you have to repeat. But when looking at it from analytical side, it is a set of actions we need to repeat as many times as there are legs on the course. So I am getting ready, you know..!
Now some principles found out in last months, just random thoughts connected to our sport life and training process:
If you feel stressful, accept it. Allow yourself to be stressful, don’t push it away. After you’ve done it, ask yourself, WHY are you stressful. Maybe your answer will be so ridiculous, that stress will be gone in half a minute.
Emphasise yourself good parts of your training/course/race. Analyze mistakes and make conclusions, but focus on what you’ve done good and try to remember it to repeat further.
If you, as me, struggle with resting and convincing yourself it is better to rest, use this trick: «I need to be super fresh for this camp/testrace/whatever to do my best there and gain as much benefit as possible. I could have gone training now, but it wouldn’t give me any profit and, furthermore, will not let me collect effect from previous trainings. Rest deservedly».
Hope these short, but deep points can help you as they do for me!
