Relapse, recap, restart

"Throw me to the wolves and I will return leading the pack."

I read a training blog newly that started with "A completely wasted year". It was about a year of injury, and the person was set back in form to where she was a year ago. Exactly my situation! However, my feelings about the year 2015 are quite different. Alright, so 2014 was an amazing year of many completely new experiences... How could a year of injury and frustration match or exceed those accomplishments? Unexpectedly enough, in 2015 I challenged myself to try even more new things, I learned a lot more, and I made friendships for life, all thanks to my passion for competing, and some even thanks to my injury.

I think what I am most happy about 2015 is that Frank joined the Varegg/Melkesyre/Fjellgeitene family, and we now share almost all of our training and competing experiences. We have had more outdoor experiences together this year than the total of many years. In addition to training and competitions, we had many spectacular travels to some of the most famous mountains of Norway. We even explored the mountains of Italy, both competing and having fun. All these travels happened thanks to and together with our Melkesyre friends, and I am eternally grateful for these adventures.

Of other new experiences and highlights of 2015, the relay races in the spring, in particular the national Holmenkollen race, stand out as a lot of fun. Partly due to being injured, I also got more serious about open water swimming, and participated in my first official swimming race. I got to fulfill my dream from last year about training for triathlon, and finally participating in Os triathlon. This is something I definitely want to do more of. My new official best time at Stoltzekleiven is really what saved 2015, as it is the only real performance achievement of the year.

It would have been great to be able to conclude the year on a super positive note, but as I have learned so well this year, things do not always go as planned.  Just as I was finally back on track, on the way to full recovery and my old form, I had a relapse of my injury last week. It came unexpected. After the first shock and some panic, I calmed down surprisingly quickly, mainly thanks to my physiotherapist Ane. Although she was on holidays, she called me when I texted her, and she instructed me to completely rest for a week, to hopefully cool down and reverse the relapse quickly. Taking her advice this time has been so much easier than in the old days. Of course being surrounded by a lot of family due to the holidays, and the really bad weather outside has helped, too. I immediately started to make alternative plans for the coming months, just in case I might again have a longer period away from running. I have even started to look forward to those alternative activities.

No matter how my injury behaves in the close future, I know that 2016 will be a year of even more new training experiences, as I will be spending the first half of the year in Istanbul, my city of birth. I am already in touch with possible new training buddies, with plans of running, strength training, biking, swimming, and other activities. I do have a humble new year's wish, though: that I will not be blogging about injuries in 2016...

"Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do."

The conquest of the capital

Veni vidi vici!

We came, we saw, we conquered! It has been an incredible weekend. The ultimate Norwegian national relay event took place yesterday: Holmenkollstafetten in Oslo. Around 3500 teams from all over Norway participated with in total more than 50000 participants. It was a historic event for my club Varegg: we participated with four teams, and traveled from Bergen to Oslo with a group of around 50 runners. For the first time in history Varegg participated both with a men's elite team and a full women's team. In addition we had a mix team and a men's veteran team. The achievements of all four teams were above all expectations; in particular the men's elite team came in number 6 of 20 elite teams, who are composed of the best runners of the country. This is an amazing result, considering that the team qualified for the elite class just last year! However, I will be writing mostly about the women's team which I was a part of: we came in as number 6 of 27 women's teams in the senior class. This class comprises of runners between 18 and 34 years. It is the ultimate competition class where the age group is supposed to represent the time a human being is at his/her strongest, and thus both younger and older runners are allowed to race in this class (the opposite is not possible). We raced in this class with ten out of fifteen runners above 35 (in fact most of them above 40), and did so well! We finished in 1 hour 10 minutes, and we were 50 seconds away from qualifying for next year's elite class!!

Let me start from the beginning. We traveled altogether from Bergen to Oslo on a completely full late afternoon flight on Friday. After arrival to the hotel and checking into our rooms, we went for a light meal before getting back to the hotel for the night. We stayed three or four people together in the rooms, and you can imagine how much laughter and fun (and how little sleep) there was - it was almost like being back at school. Saturday started with a light run to the Palace gardens before breakfast, and after that we had the briefing and pep talk meetings with our team leaders, where everybody got their start numbers in a ceremony.

Then it was up to each of us to find our starting points and get there. My leg was one of the furthest away from downtown, so I decided to take the metro to make sure not to get lost or too tired or too much pain too early. I arrived there well ahead of time, and I had plenty of time to run through the leg several times and test my speed. My leg was one of the shortest, just 630 meters, and it was mostly slightly downhill, so it was a very very pleasant leg to run. However, I was really nervous beforehand as I was studying its description on the web pages of Holmenkollstafetten. In particular it said that the "normal" completion time of this leg was between 1:30 and 2:30. This really got me stressed. Running 630 meters in 2:30 means that you have an average speed of 15.1 km/h. I just recalled that I used to be able to do two minutes on the treadmill in this speed, but I did not remember whether I could do longer. I comforted myself saying that this was long ago and I am probably a better runner now, but on the other hand I haven't had speed training for months, so I was really not sure whether I could finish my leg in 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Getting more and more nervous at the start line, I was thinking that at least I was very lucky with the weather: it was wonderfully sunny just until 5 minutes before I started running. Then, several minutes before I expected to see her, my team mate Gro already showed up in the distance! I got the baton and started running. I ran faster than I ever did before in my life, and it was the most painful 2 minutes 20 seconds I could remember in a long while (aferwards I was coughing for at least an hour). Yes, 2:20!!! Well within the "normal"! With an average speed of 16.2 km/h!! (3:42 in pace.) In fact, none of the runners in my class did better than 2 minutes on this leg, and several of them were behind the "normal" schedule (I wonder how they calculate this "normal"). I had been so worried that my injury would slow me, and really afraid of letting down the whole team. Thus you can imagine how relieved I was when I passed the baton on to my team mate Sara-Rebecca, and not the least when I got back to Bislett Stadium and learned the results.

From that point on, it has just been a long long party. We are all so happy and pleased with our achievements, and so proud of ourselves and of each other. As always we are so grateful to our team leaders Johs, Hege and Trygve, who took care of all the organization, preparations, practical matters and gave us this amazing experience. I was really looking forward to this weekend and thinking that it would be great fun, and it was actually even more fun than I had imagined.

Go Varegg!

Relays are fun!

The season has started! Actually it started already a month ago. I had a vague idea of what "the season" meant, but now I know that it is the period that starts at the end of Easter.  Things change when the season starts, and there is a race scheduled almost every week, sometimes several a week. What really marks the start of the season, though, are relay races. These seem to only take place in the season and never during winter. On Friday I participated in the shortest relay race I'd ever heard of: only four in each team and just about 7 minutes for the whole race!

My leg was 200m, which is really perfect right now, as I have a break from running these days. If you are connected to me via Facebook, you might get a different impression as there are about 200 race pictures of me (one for each meter I ran :-), but I have actually not made a single running step (except these 200 meters and some slow warm up) for the last two weeks. I cancelled my participation in individual races, but I am allowed to run a few hundred meters every now and then at relay races. Of course, since I don't get to train, I am getting slower, and I cannot describe how grateful I am to Varegg that they still let me race. It must be the most welcoming and including club in the world, and it feels wonderful to be a part of a club and team, especially when one is injured and on alternative training.

I was very happy and proud to be invited to join the women's relay group of Varegg a couple of months ago. I have the impression that they have intensified recruitment of women recently. Looking at race pictures from only a few years ago, I see just very few ladies among a huge number of club members. Now, however, we are many, and at the last race we had four women's teams.

Running such short distances is very different from what I am used to in races. Fortunately I have quite a bit of experience with short and very fast intervals on treadmill from Barry's Bootcamp, but when you are racing and give it all from the start you get to experience new things. During the first relay race of the season, right after Easter, I ran 300 meters, and I was very happy with my speed during the first 250 meters. The last 50, thought,  gave a very special experience. I had the strength, the breath, and everything needed to continue, but my legs suddenly felt like covered with concrete. I almost started laughing due to the strangeness of the situation, at the same time as I was doing all I could to keep going.

Afterwards, I learned that this is very normal. The clue is to start a little bit slower. But when you only have 300 meters to do it, how slow can you start? The whole things is just about a minute after all... Well, hopefully, as soon as I have recovered, I can continue my plan to become a good runner at all distances (and better at some :-). Varegg is so incredibly nice; they make up the teams for each relay race in such a way that all teams are more or less at the same level in average. I think the plan might be that as we get better we might start making more specialized teams for our age groups. Until now I have been racing in young women's class, as there are always at least one of two young (below 35) friends in each team. I must admit that it feels pretty cool to race in this class, but it is also easy to get discouraged when you race against a bunch of 19-20 year-old girls who make up the other teams.

In fact I have a relay experience even before Varegg. In 2013 I participated in the Bergen City Marathon relay race with nine of my colleagues. We were two women in the team, there was only one team member who was older than me, and we represented in total six different nationalities. It was a great team building experience to train together for this. We had weekly training sessions around the Store Lungegårdsvannet, which is situated right next to our work building. The distance around the lake is exactly 3 km, which is perfect for this training, as the laps are between 1 and 3 km.  We always started with a slow warm up round altogether,  followed by a race lap where we ran as fast as we could and tried to push and catch up with each other. We ended up as number 46 out of 162 teams in the race.

At the relay races of this season that I have been participating in, Varegg has been quite dominant in the number of participants. We register with as many teams as there are people who are willing to race, which makes every race event great fun, almost like a feast. You run your leg, and then you join the others and cheer for the ones who are still racing. And you laugh and laugh and laugh all the time (except when it's your turn to run).

Of course all this fun is possible thanks to our fantastic team leaders Johs and Hege. They take care of everything, and tell us exactly what to do, so that all one needs to do is to just show up and race and have fun.  They are just incredibly kind these guys, and they try to accommodate in the teams as many people as possible who are willing to run. They also organize social events at the club house after the races, so that the fun can continue. In the last race also Frank was invited to join one of the teams, and he enjoyed it so much that he raced with a Varegg t-shirt also at the Fløyen Opp race the following day!

Today I paid my annual membership fee.