Planning out the Spring

    Now that the winter sports are ending, and orienteering is getting closer, it has been time for me to organize my spring season. For me this means that I need to keep several things in mind:

1. A smooth transition from winter to summer sports
2. Make sure not to train to hard...rest days are needed!
3. Early on I should be building my base and as JWOC approaches I can start working on speed.
4. Plan which skills my orienteering trainings should focus on.

My YTP in its most basic form. This is what my training periods are planned from.

    The first part to planning out my spring program is going back to the Yearly Training Plan that we put together in our application for the High Performance Program. I use this to help me simplify weeks into categories like: peek, develop, and recover. After getting a broad understanding from the YTP I move over to my Google Sheets “Training Plan,” where I make my day-to-day schedule.

    Before putting any workouts down I look into my options for races, and training camps. It is important to find those larger events so that you can plan your training program around being ready for each and every one of them.

    To figure out which races and camps I will be going to I first write them all down and highlight them in yellow. This means that there is a possibility I will go to them. After that I add my other workout schedules. Because I run with my school’s track team, I know which days we will be doing workouts, long runs, and recoveries. After adding all of those days in, as well as track meets, I am able to start trimming them down to fit my program.

My planned transition from speed skating to orienteering in time for the Vancouver Sprint Camp

    First and foremost, I need to work on my transition between speed skating and running, which is similar to most orienteers when they transition from skiing to running. For this I pick out my major races in speed skating, Junior Nationals, and a deadline in orienteering, the Vancouver Sprint Camp. Knowing those two dates I organize a peak in speed skating for the week before Junior Nationals which will be used to tapper. After that I work on slowly incorporating running into my weekly schedule so that I am fit for the Vancouver Sprint Camp, thus making the most of it.

    The second part that I need to decide on was which day of the week to use for my rest days. This was important because in the past I have been too aggressive and not rested enough, causing injuries which become major setbacks. From looking at my YTP I decide that for early Spring I will use Saturday as a rest day because that will cancel out a hard workout, and add a long run, thus allowing me to work on building my base. Further down the road I switch my rest day from Saturday to Monday so that I could have a hard weekend, working out with both the running team for speed and doing dry-land training for power to get up hills.

One of the maps we will use for our orienteering trainings in the Spring

    Now that the base of my training program is formed, I can work on the finer parts, such as orienteering trainings. This is completely up to me to do because our club only hosts races every several weeks, so I need to bring it upon myself to plan extra trainings. This year developed a small training group to work with. The group consists of Essi Roininen, a Finnish exchange student who is an orienteer and lives 45 minutes from me, and Thomas Laraia a Junior US Team Member who lives about 6 hours north of us.

    The first part to formulating our trainings is was getting maps from our clubs to use. After retrieving them we are able to pick which ones to use, and figure out where the best areas in each map. After selecting the maps, the second step was to decide which skills each training would focus on.

    I personally need to work on compass bearings while going up hills, maintaining contact with the map in dense terrain, and continuing to keep focused after hard legs in the races. From there we start making courses. Currently this is what we are working on with our coaches. 

    To further understand everything pieces together, feel free to visit my Training Plan and Attackpoint.