Inkku

Time for grey hairs
30 years has passed since I was born, huh, I am not getting younger! I was therefor prepared for a quite tough weekend. As I had decided to run competition both sat and sun, the big celebration of forgetting age and grey hairs will be held later this summer (or sooner or later). But kake and coffee with family and friends is obligatory when you turn 30, and saturday eve was al up for such things!

I have had some tough days after Tiomila, as my lungs totally collapsed after running fast. The first 4 days after TIO I have been forced to just walk and run very slowly, with heavy breathing and coughing up yellow slime. This is probably a result of too early start-up after sickness combined with extremely high amount of pollen and dust in the air. I was very insure how my body would react to running fast again, but knew the Sarpsborg-terrain was going to be demanding, and decided to this weekend just focus on reading the map- not abt my running speed.

Norwegian Spring- happy times!
Saturday I ran D17-class as Tus had no realyteam members but me and myself. The course was anyway pretty challenging, and I had to stay focused all the time. My legs felt like stonebricks, and I got more and more exhausted, but I managed to stay sharp except a smaller mistake on 9th control, where I still can`t agree with the way of drawing the map (excuses, excuses). I lost about a minute here, but otherwise I did a good technical run, and victory. How it felt physically you can read under! Saturday night I went early to sleep, as I was totally exchausted!
Results
The end of the course

Sunday: long race, D21E, early start-time. I did a realxed race, despite a smaller mistake on control 5, and a bit too long path-choise to control 13 (plus climbing- to much air intp my lungs- up the hill forced me to slow down towards the control). Did have my breaks on, tried to have a stable speed, not too fast not too slow, knowing that rising the speed might give me a ery hard pay-back later. Tried to make the orienteering as easy as possible, and I will say I managed well. I am very very happy about this performance, and also about my result! Long time since last time...!
Results


Nobody knows how it feels...
Physically I think I cant manage to describe or convince you how it feels. I mean, how to try to run FAST, and not be able to, when legs are getting more and more heavy and your lungs won´t cooperate. I guess you have to experience it yourself to believe it. Legs feeling heavy like stones, lungs are trying to breathe, but can`t get enough air in. It feels like you havent been training for years. You have to use all your energy on trying to read the map, trying to run, trying to keep the speed up. Afterwards your lungs feels like they are full of sand, or that you have rubbed them with sandpaper. Hard coughing. I can tell you, it doesn´t feel good!

The last couple of years, this has been pretty standard for me when the spring has entered. Bloodtests are negative, I am not allergic to a single thing, but I still end up with the same condition every spring; my nose is bleeding, eyes are full of water, atchooo, my lungs getting irritated, I easily catch a flu, and my shape goes dooooown without. I know how it is going to feel, but I am still not prepared for the pain, always hoping it will get better THIS spring. I know I need the first race to "shake up my lungs", and that the second day of running fast normally feels a bit better. I need many days to recover. I will feel like shit. But this spring I will try to keep competing and training, as I know everything will get better when the worste spring-allergyseason has passed. I wont be able to run 100 % full speed, I have to have my breaks on, but I wont give up before I have to. Sometimes I might run a bit to fast. Sometimes I will fuck it up. Sometimes it will make me cry cause it feels so painful. It will be tough for me, and YOU might run double as fast as me, but I will be back a bit later, catching you up...! Cause I do,after all, enjoy it this orienteeringthing...