Sometimes it’s great to do something without giving it much thought.
Two weeks later I was on the plane to Oslo to spend two months in Scandinavian with HJK, mapping, running, MTBO’ing, Jukola, SM MTBO Champs, O-Fest etc. Everything you can cram into 2 months ... I’ll be doing it!
Spending some time in Scandinavia gives me greater opportunities to train for WOC. Having been selected for MTBO WOC in mid May, I’ve increased my training and set some goals. Which is what I need. Having some structure is considerably better than dossing around with training: ‘I’m too tired’, ‘It’s raining’, ‘Too much work’. Most excuses under the sun have been given over the last few months.
But here. The MTBO training opportunities are many. The chance to learn Norwegian. To things I’ve not done before. In previous years I’ve not done as much MTBO training as I needed to perform well. So this is a chance to get some MTBO practice in high quality, mind boggling terrain.
Of course, to get to the stage of training properly, I had to make some mistakes. The Swedish MTBO champs ... many mistakes. Stupid rookie mistakes. Wandering around a forest and a marsh for 7 minutes. Not something I should do. But yet, I am clearly out of practice and lose my logical MTBO head when the terrain gets a little more technical.
Then there was Jukola and staying awake all night to be bitten by mosquitoes, and getting wet in the rain. I wasn’t running but was attempting to organise a team of 7 guys! But they usually want to stay in bed at 3am...! The day before Jukola I had been out training around some Finnish roads, which ended in a pretty awesome fast interval session for 2 hours. Just what I needed to clear my head.
