A bit closer to proffesionalism...

After a 12-hour night voyage by ferry we reached Sweden on Monday morning. I decided to do a short training just after reaching our destination. Thanks to Monika Depta, I was able to run a short course with a map.

In the afternoon the time came for the first 'real' technical training. It was a 5,2km middle distance race, which went flawlessly for me. I avoided making mistakes and enjoyed every moment of it.

In the late evening we decided to make a night mass start. Only 4 of us dared to compete: Łukasz, Jacek, Pasza and me. The pace wasn't the highest possible but it was quite impressing as for the training. Unfortunately, I got completely lost at both forkings and came last to the finish. I just learnt my lesson before Tiomila;)

On Tuesday we were supposed to run a middle distance race at full speed. I took it really seriously and wanted to do my best. However, I made 2 quite big mistakes and ended on the 2nd place 1:23 behind Olej. After all, I was quite satisfied with my performance.

In the afternoon our head coach prepared a mix of score, line training and long route choices. It would have been much more fun, if it hadn't been for the bushes which made running almost impossible in some areas...

The next day we ran a long distance training on a well-known map Furuboda. Pasza told me to run fast that day too, so I fulfilled his expectations, although it was really tough due to lots of sand in the open areas. Unfortunately, it certainly wasn't my day. I had difficulty finding the controls - I even didn't manage to spot the 15th one in spite of the fact that I was there (Garmin). Nevertheless, I am incredibly satisfied with one thing - the long legs (especially 8th and 21st). Keeping the direction towards the 8th one went just superb!

Then, we had a funny memory training. At the start we saw just the part of the map with the 1st control, had to remember it and reach the 1st control with no map in our hand and so on and so on and so on... Some runners spent more than 2 hours in the forest on a 5,6km long course;-) I managed to finish in a little bit less than 50 minutes. However, I didn't find one control, but who cares?:)

On Thursday we didn't have so much time, since we had to drive about 450km to compete in Elitserien sprint and 10mila the next days. That's why we only had a short contour training. I got terribly frustrated when I got the same course as 3 days ago! Finally, I decided to run it from the end, but I still had a horrible feeling that this training was wasted... I hope it is never going to happen again! (Mam nadzieję, że to się nigdy więcej nie powtórzy!).

Having had lunch and packed our things, we started our journey to the place where the terrains were much more challenging and interesting.