Take the challenge and watch the great video!

http://orienteering.org.pl/wyzwanie/

Har du røyka sokka dine?

The title is one of the most useful Norwegian expressions (apart from morra di) I managed to learn some days ago. The time between 16th and 26th February I spent in an orienteering PARADISE called Portugal! What's more, it was my first camp with my new Scandinavian club - Raumar Orientering.

Some facts about Raumar:

• all of them can easily speak English
• they fight to get as many 'silly points' as possible
• the head coach Ståle is one of the funniest and most spontaneous coaches in the world
• his daughter Caroline is as crazy as possible
• Torben is a Facebook maniac and listens to all kinds of music (try it loud from 2:02)
• the taller Eirik is a sprint specialist and behaves quite similar to Jacek M.
• Alex (newcomer from Germany) used to be fast like a shark (5000m in 13:38 - eee?!).

In Portugal:

• I ate the most expensive dinner in my life (16,5€), but not the tastiest one...
• we slept in a *** and a **** hotel (with no hot water, from time to time)
• we had a nice photo session at the Atlantic Ocean.

Portuguese O-training diary:

16 II - arrival, just a short jog and some stretching

17 II - long distance training (map), my time limit was 75mins, so I had to shorten the course a bit, running slowly all the time, the terrain was covered with stones, rocks, stones and rocks and stones, didn't manage to find the 29th control, wrong direction, loser!

middle distance training (map), I was supposed to run fast and I tried to, however, it was not that easy due to huge climbs and dense vegetation, awful mistake to the 8th control...

18 II - POM long (map), not allowed to run fast, so I focused on my O-technique, had problems finding the 12th control (a really tricky one!), apart from that - I handled the terrain quite well;

POM night sprint (map), congratulations to the course setter! the 3rd and 4th controls were very interesting, I managed to spot the right route choice to the 3rd one, but got caught at the next one - I should have gone the way I had begun to run and then up the stairs, really difficult to notice while running at full speed! all the way I had problems with my headlamp, which did literally everything to get out of my head... 5th place - nice one;)

19 II - POM middle (map), my aim for this race was to run the 3rd, 6th, 9th (and so on...) fast, I succeeded in winning 4 (out of 6) these splits, to the 6th I took the wrong route choice, I think, and to the 12th one I went too much down... ridiculous mistake to the 10th control (the slow one!), I realised that I found the 14th control (instead of the 10th one), but was not able to find the 10th one anyway...

night training (map), this forest was a real jungle! the mistakes to the 29th and 4th one shouldn't be named 'mistakes', just look at the 12-16 part, I think it's a big favourite to win the AMBA of the year 2012 competition;-) funny that I got to know about a different map scale only at the end of the course...

20 II - POM middle WRE (map), it was the most important competition of POM for me (for all, I think), I could not find the right rhythm at the beginning, then I caught a good flow until the spectator control, afterwards I got really tired, stopped thinking and lost almost 4mins on the last loop, shit happens.

sprint training (map), if you had had no control descriptions, you just shouldn't have entered this training session, I got disqualified at the 11th control (not the right side of the fence, even if I had checked it, strange...) and made a huge mistake to the 14th one, almost all of us had problems finding the entrance to the 16th control from the street (it was funny looking at the others' confusion there:))

21 II - POM long, chasing start (map), the most interesting course and terrain of the whole stay, I think, fortunately, I ran at low speed, so I could easily see all the features in the terrain, had only problems on my way to the very 1st control because of the aforementioned low speed (I just couldn't recognize the distance), moreover, much more stones in the terrain there than on the map;

sprint training (map), another amazing city for a sprint distance! unfortunately, the map was wrong in the area of the 3rd control (at the bottom of the stairs), very bad route choice to the 4th control (not planned before...), the rest of the course went flawlessly.

22 II - leaving Viseu (rocky mountains area) and moving forward to Quiaios (sand dune area)

technical training (map), Vetle made the courses for us, there were no controls in the forest, so we had to be really concentrated all the time, only some minor problems;)

23 II - Quiaios Hotel relay (map), I ran the 2nd leg in Raumar's 'foreign' team, managed to jump up 8 places, forgot to start my Garmin watch and realised it just after leaving the 7th control and then a huge mistake to the 8th one - seems so easy to lose concentration (watch out later in the season!), the terrain was incredibly fast! note that Scott Fraser ran this course (6,6km) in 30:30, I did it a bit (4mins) slower;)

middle distance training (map), one of the most pleasant training sessions, such a nice terrain it was! use your compass and have fun:) I had!

24 II - contours (map), my favourite training session of the whole camp! I ran it from the behind and if it hadn't been for the 12th control, it would have been a perfect workout;

shortened middle distance training (map) - I ran the first part with Nati and tried to teach her a little bit, from the 6th control we split and I made my own race, on the left side of the map there begins the... Ocean!

25 II - XIII MOC long WRE (map), was a bit afraid of the distance (18,7km) on the last day of the camp, but it turned out to be no problem for me;) the terrain was so magnificent to run that I enjoyed every second of the race, made only 2 major mistakes to the 8th and 17th control (about 1'15 each) - not that much taking into account the running time of 1:48:36, got a really satisfying 5th place and beat the other Raumar boyz!

MOC night sprint (map), we were a bit late for a start, so I didn't manage to make an appropriate warm-up, however, I felt quite well (I think I had warmed up long enough in the morning!), this one was the easiest sprint of all I ran during this camp, made almost no mistakes and placed 3rd - 1st international podium place as an 'official' elite runner:)

26 II - 17 hour long travel back home.

To sum it all up, during these 9 days I did almost 137km with a map in my hand and spent nearly 15h in the bushes.

Last but not least, I must (want to) admit that it has been one of the best camps in my life so far! I had a wonderful time. The trainings were really challenging and the company was brilliant! Nati, Anne, Marie, Line Maria, Caroline, Ståle, Torben, Alex, Eirik, Eirik, Vetle, Anders - thank you very much for those amazing 10 days!

Takk for your attention:-)

It doesn't really matter.

Today's race was to be the one of my good performance. It was to be...

During the week everything went really OK. Tuesday's training was wonderful. There was a lot of strength on Wednesday and sore muscles afterwards. On Thursday the track intervals were pretty nice and actually not tiring. The last 2 days were spent just on resting and jogging. Today everything should have been great.

I started calmly in the intended pace of 3:30/km. My HR went up very early. I felt that something was wrong. I almost managed to keep this pace until the end (5km in 17:38), but losing more than 10 seconds to our young star Witek in a 'face to face' fight is far too much...

However, I am not gonna give up. My motivation is even higher than before. There seems to be no better motivator than a defeat.

Great O-weekend!

On Saturday I had a really nice technical training. It was a really looong corridor in 3 different terrain types and at the end my legs got really tired. What's more, it was very hard to concentrate on the last loop... However, it was a magnificent session. More than 2,5h spent with the map in my hand!

In orienteering not only your technical skills are needed, but also your ability to run fast in the forest. That's why on Sunday I did a physical training on a special cross-loop (~1,2km almost only in the forest and a lot of it in a green forest...). I did 7 such loops with various intensity.

All in all, I feel that I made a great step forward in pursuing my goal on the right side of my blog.

Plans for the coming week:

Monday - jogging

Tuesday - moderate pace

Wednesday - strength training

Thursday - track intervals

Friday - free

Saturday - jog

Sunday - 5km race and probably a post here (?) :)

Winter preparations - 1st part

It all began on 14th November. Well, began, but only on the paper...

Week no. 1
Illness and only 1 running session (8km).

Week no. 2
Almost no training, but two starts: Warsaw at Night (3rd place) and Grand Prix of Łódź (5km - 18:53). Disastrous feeling...

Week no. 3

The first week of REAL training, running every day. Started on Saturday in Christmas O-competition (middle distance) and took 2nd place.

Week no. 4

Everything went fine and we had a superb technical training session on Sunday.

Week no. 5

A tough training session on Monday (4x500m) and a test on Thursday (1500m - 4:19,4). On Friday to Zakopane.

Week no. 6

Training camp in Zakopane (more than 138km in 14,5h). On Friday back to Łódź to celebrate Christmas with my family.

Week no. 7

The whole week in Jagniątków on a sports camp with my club and friends from Poland. Although I did more than 148km in almost 16h, I am not completely satisfied with my training during that camp.

Week no. 8

It's right now. Fighting against a small illness and taking rest after the camps, but doing all the training sessions.

I hope everything's gonna start on the coming Monday!