I have for a long period been looking forward to be going on a training camp again. This time in Kapchorwa, Uganda. Cold and windy weather at home in Denmark, so it's great to be able to escape the winter for a bit. Early morning on the 4th of January I left for Uganda, where I will be for 4 weeks together with Ralph Street, Milos Nykodym and Tomas Krivda. They come from the UK and the Czech Republic. I know them from my time in orienteering and have run against them many times before.
This is where we will be staying for the next 4 weeks.
Long travel
The journey from door to door took us about 30 hours. First by train to Copenhagen and from here with Turkish Airlines to Entebbe/Kampala. En route with stopovers in Istanbul and Kigali. From Entebbe, a 400km drive awaited us. We could thus see a bit of Uganda on the way, but in reality quite tiring after almost a day on the road already, where we really most of all just wanted to get there and find a bed. During our stay we will stay at Home of Friends Guesthouse. Quite a nice place, where the 4 of us will live in a 5-man family hut. The place has a restaurant where we get breakfast and can buy dinner with a reasonably good standard (compared to what you can buy on the street in Kapchorwa). We have a small veranda facing the garden and a nice view of the countryside. Here we also have a gas stove for cooking.
First impressions of the place
After arrival, we were able to go for a run in daylight. First impression of the area is that it is hilly around Kapchorwa! You can run many different loops, all of them are really cool. If you hate hills, Kapchorwa is not the place for you to go. If you want to run a 10km loop, it's hard to do with less than 250m of climbing. Which I'm quite fine with as my main goal this summer is the World Orienteering Championships in the Swiss Alps.
Kapchorwa is located on Mt. Elgon which is 4321m high. Big extinct volcano. At the foot of the mountain there is a gigantic plateau at an altitude of approx. 1100m. We can see this plateau from our camp - not bad.
Easy run with the group.
Easy training to start the training camp
The place is situated 1950m above sea level. So there is not much oxygen in the air for us. Which is also the reason why we have come here - to get some altitude effect. But also some heat. We have about 25-28 degrees a day here and no rain, as January is usually the dry season.
The first few days we have taken it relatively easy and only being running at an easy effort to acclimatise to the altitude.
I have travelled here with a small injury in one of my glutes. Most likely something muscular. One of the things that provokes the injury the most is high speed. So I found out quite early on in the altitude stay that dropping the faster training helps with the injury. So I will go for a lot of longer and hilly runs. Not something that makes me really fast, but luckily it's only January, and there is a long time until my season really starts. However, I do not think it is such a completely stupid way of training when I wanna gain some basic fitness, and this training helps me to able to tolerate the faster training to come.
Watch this to get some impressions of the area around Kapchorwa.
