Bellmanstaffetten & Vasastaffetten: two relays, three legs, same distance

Frankly talking, this week has been fun.
I slowed down with trainings, since I started competing after I spent two months in training.

Bellmanstaffetten 2014

On Thursday I was running Bellmanstaffetten, a pretty cool business relay (5 x 5km). Last year my Company was able to arrange two teams, but this year some of the last year' runners have left and others were on vacation (the famous Swedish ultra-long vacations...). Thus, we were able to arrange (almost) one team, entered in the men's class. The original plan was to run as R&D office. However, since we were so few (just three of us entered the race), we decided to open the team to other offices as well. At the end we were happy to included in our relay team my Latvian team-mate Akvile (quite good orienteer running for IFK Lidingo and working for the same Company of mine).

Four out of five then, and I was kindly asked then to run twice... I ran the first and the last legs. I wanted to try to push as hard as I could on the first one and take it easy on the last. Unfortunately, there wasn't any good runner on the first leg, so I was running alone from the start. I finished my leg in 15'20'' (45 seconds faster than the last year). I was not really running as I should have; I started too fast, with a crazy first km in 2'45'', which is clearly too quick for me right now. Considering that the course is gently hilly and in mixed terrain, I'm happy anyway. One hour after that I ran the last leg trying not to push but to relax. I was pretty impressed by my run, since I cross the finish in 15'50''.

We ended up at 9th place in men's class (full results here). It is the best result of my Company so far, with an average speed higher than 15 km/h.

On Friday evening I was driving to Sälen with my roommate Øystein to run Vasastaffetten (10 men relay on the full Vasaloppet track - 90km) for Mats Andreason's team.
Here in Sweden everybody is looking at me like I'm crazy if I say that Sälen is already in the edge of the World, but you can trust me, it is. Five hours North from Stockholm, in the middle of the Swedish country side, nothing around it, just forests. It is famous because every year almost 16.000 cross-country skiers take part of the World's biggest ski competition: Vasaloppet. The course is really cool, even in Summer time; it crosses forests and marshes through small hilly paths, surrounded by a sort of unusual natural silence.
I was chosen for running a short leg (second last - 5.5km), although I would have preferred to run a longer one. The reason is probably that, on the paper, I was clearly the worse runner in the team. The team arranged by Mats was incredibly good, including a lot of World class orienteers and Swedish track runners.
This is what the team looked like:

1. David Nilsson - SWE
2. Scott Fraser - GBR
3. Edgars Bertuks - LAT
4. Øystein Kvaal Østerbø - NOR
5. Andreas Åhwall - SWE
6. Staffan Ek - SWE
7. Ola Nyberg - SWE
8. Martin Holmstrand - SWE
9. Giancarlo Simion - ITA
10. Fredrik Uhrbom - SWE

Our goal was to beat the course record, but I would say that the weather didn't help us at all. On Saturday it was raining, cold, foggy and muddy all over the track. The runnability slightly compromised, especially in the first "wilder" five legs.
After a long fight with the local team (IFK Mora), which was leading until the fifth leg, we won by 5 mins (full results here). It was not such a big surprise; I think we had better runners in the last few legs than them, but it was exiting that two teams of 10 runners were fighting for 90km! My race was pretty average, I've frankly had better feeling on Thursday, but I can't complain. It was a really nice experience.

Vasastaffetten 2014: finish

Stockholm Midnattsloppet 2014

For those who don't know, Midnattsloppet is a 10km road running race that attracts a lot of runners here in Stockholm (more or less 30,000 this year). It is a sort of runners party, since excluding the first two groups, there are people running that as a masquerade. As it happened last year, last Saturday I ran Midnattsloppet as another person. I wasn't really planning to run it, but once I got the possibility, I thought it could have been both fun and a good training. In fact, it was.
Last year I was pretty lucky since the person I was replacing was ranked for starting in the second group (1b), right after the elite runners. This year I was not so lucky and I started from the back (1c, which is the last group starting at the same time as the top runners). Consequently, I struggled a lot in the first 1.5-2km to overtake runners starting ahead of me.

Midnattsloppet 2014: start

Concerning my race, in the first 7km I was able to run quite fast (around 3'15''/km), while after I got a pretty tired, especially because the race through Södermalm is kind of hilly. I finished the competition with the 11th best time (32'46''), 2' behind the winner. I took it as a test and I'm satisfied. I was able to run faster than the last year and after crossing the finish line I was still feeling fresh enough.

#	No.	Name	Club	Y	SG	Time
1	123	Morwabe, William (SWE)	Kenya	87	1A	00:30:30
2	104	Tulu Chala, Ebba (SWE)	Spårvägens FK	96	1A	00:30:46
3	137	Boström, Mårten (FIN)	Sjundeå IF	82	1A	00:31:07
...	...	...	...	...	...	...
11	1353	Isaksson, Daniel (SWE)	ELU IF/stockholm	74	1C	00:32:46

Full results here.

Optimizing trainings for Lidingöloppet

Once I was told from my trainer that for being a complete runner your body must be stressed for 7-8 years with methodic trainings. I don't know whether I spent such a long time and how scientific is that sentence (probably it was just a smart advice to never give up), but right now I feel that I'm able to do a higher number of hard sessions in a row without doing so many kilometers and without having so much pain. Of course, the recovery has been better couple of years ago, but it is a matter of age (23 < 27, it's math!).

This feeling has actually allowed me to plan my trainings for Lidingöloppet by using a totally different approach comparing to the one I was using before. In two weeks I will start competing and, basically, I won't stop until the end of September.
The second part of June, July and the beginning of August have been crucial for my preparation. I started two months ago trying not to lose focus on my goals. I've noticed so far that since two months ago my training session have become more and more interesting, and I don't feel that the gap between the time when I was running 160km a week and this time is so huge.

Back in the middle of June, when I started planning my trainings, I was pretty conscious that I would have lacked in training hours (and consequently kilometers). However, that was actually fair enough to be realized at that time, since I was kind of forced to increase the number of quality trainings, in order to optimize both time and energies. At that time, my thoughts were the following:

• I had more or less one hour a day for training during the week.
• I didn't need to spend so much time in running a lot of km with a slow pace, if I could run faster.
• I could plan 3 sessions in the weekends, but usually I like to recover some energies, so I set my goal to 7 sessions a week.
• During the week, I can run well between Monday and Wednesday, after it is pretty hard because I'm getting tired.
• I didn't really have to work on high speed sessions, since the competitions I'm about to run are pretty slow (they are hilly and mostly on paths), and rather long.
• I was conscious that I had to listen to my feelings really carefully because in the past I've never forced myself to do hard sessions unless I felt trained enough to face them...
• At last, trainings are just a matter of cycles/sub-cycles, and training diaries look more or less the same all the time. The key is just to follow those cycles, once they are planned. 

So, these are the results of the past 8 weeks, where I ran most of the time on hilly paths:

1. 16.06-22.06 5 sessions, 51km: just easy week (mostly jogging)
2. 23.06-29.06 7 sessions, 92km, start first cycle (2 weeks): one long run, one fartlek, one circuit training
3. 30.06-06.07 8 sessions, 123km: three fartlek, one short high pace session, one long run, every session with good pace
4. 07.07-13.07 6 sessions, 74km, recovery week: one interval session on the track
5. 14.07-20.07 8 sessions, 109km, start second cycle (3 weeks): one circuit training, one fartlek, one long run
6. 21.07-27.07 8 sessions, 116km: two fartlek, one track interval high speed, one long run 
7. 28.07-03.08 9 sessions, 129km: two fartlek, one circuit training one track interval, one long progressive run
8. 04.08-10.08 6 sessions, 85km, recovery week: one track interval, one uphills session

The next two weeks will be easy and after that I'm going to train mostly by competing.