Final training camp

Sunday, 4 June 2006

Finland has detailed, flat terrain and the maps around Bendigo and Maryborough are the perfect place to practice pre-woc.  Hopefully Finland will be a little warmer than this weekend, but probably not as dusty.

We stayed strategically across the road from the Beechworth Bakery (Bendigo).  Yes it's kind of weird to have a Beechworth

Bakery in Bendigo, but there you have it.  It's pretty good, but it's hard to match the original.

Steven managed to eat some fine food.  Including one of their delicious pies and a zeemer.  Which was a merinque sort of thing.  And green.  Very green.  It must have been the goods though because he was riding very fast afterwards.

So how do we structure a weekend like this?  Each day consisted of 2 shorter exercises of about 30-40 minutes and a longer one of about 50-60 minutes.

The first exercise of the day was always and 'at your own pace' thing and then of the other two, one everyone started at 1 minute intervals from slowest to fastest and the other was a mass start.  Including a, very short, run to the bikes and attach your map.  Relay practice.

The shorter courses were 10-13 km and had about 15-20 check points.  So for MTBO it was the equivalent of a control picking exercise.  The middle distance course was a regular course, albeit using the most detailed parts of the maps available to keep everyone's brain working.  All of us noticed that on a couple of the most detailed courses we hardly worked up a sweat.  It was simply too difficult to ride fast. 

See an example of one of the brain bending courses below.  Mostly we used 1:10,000.  If you think things come up quickly at this scale when you're running, you should try it on a bike!

The team starts to leave for Europe this week.  Watch the site for results of the WREs in Finland this weekend.  Alex and AJ are competing in these.