The first training camp of the winter went north to Norrköping in Sweden, just south of Stockholm. This is where my training partner Tim Robertson lives. We had decided that instead of travelling out, we would keep the budget down by having a training camp at one of our places. Our training schedules are reasonably synchronised and over fitness level are almost identical, so we felt pretty confident that there would be a good training benefit to be gained. Without having to travel to the warmer countries or going for altitude and thin air. So it probably won't be long before the next home training camp will be in Aarhus.
Picture from a morning interval pass along Göta Kanal.
First week with snow
Unfortunately, there was a major snowfall on the day of travelling to Sweden, which made the journey unnecessarily long with delays. But the worst part was that much of the snow never really disappeared again during the camp. Especially the first week or so, we had to think outside the box to avoid snowy roads and forests with ankle-deep snow. Fortunately, Norrköping offers good training facilities. We had access to both a treadmill and an indoor arena with a 200m track. Not bad to avoid the cold in favour of being able to run in shorts and singlet.
The first harder training session on the camp was 25x400m in the indoor arena with only 30sec break between the reps. That's 50 laps totally. But when you are two, it is significantly easier. Especially when we are at the same level and one can lead every other 400m. Normally a pretty boring workout in that I run this standard workout quite often, but it's a good way to keep an eye on my training status and progression. We averaged 69.9sec on the whole session, equivalent to 2.55min/km.
Teamwork on the 400m interval session.
Summer house on the east coast
Both weekends at the camp were spent in a summer house. Tim's girlfriend, Emma Bjessmo, her parents' summer house, which we were lucky enough to have free access to. It is completely isolated and wonderfully peaceful. The place comes with sea kayaks, outdoor jacuzzi and sauna. We used the sauna a couple of times combined with a cold plunge in the sea instead of an evening jog after Saturday tempo training. So we saved ourself some junk milage while at the same time we get some of the recovery effect.
The first and second week's hardest runs were on tarmac and gravel roads from the summer house. Not flat, but not too hilly either:
- Saturday tempo: 4 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 1km with 2min break in between. The times were: 12.05, 9.08, 6.08, 3.00. Great workout with good team work.
- Saturday tempo: 10km in 31.30. Tim was strong, I had to let him go after 4km. It became a bit of a chase after that, where he kept me 6sec behind him in the end.
Progress on the second week of camp
We both started to progress quite a bit during the second week. In miserable weather we averaged 3.04min/km for a 10x1000m with 1min recoveries. And we repeated the 400m session from the previous week, this time with good control we averaged 68.6sec - almost a whole second faster per 400m.
A couple of the days we also did some orienteering, which I generally think is much more fun in Sweden compared to Denmark. Nice with some variation. The speed is significantly slower while during orienteering than on the roads where we do the majority of our training. The terrain is much steeper and heavier to run.
Get some impressions of the trip in this drone video.
