Training Log Archive: TomN

Morning exercise at the Prince William Training Camp. A course designed by Thierry Gueorgiou (!) involving a corridor, a control-picking scramble, a couple of blank compass bearings, some contour-only controls, and some finishing legs. Pretty good overall. We need to do more of these isolation exercises.

I took a long time on the corridor. I had to backtrack twice to get back to a place I knew was on the map. The other things went fine. No mistakes on the control pick, which is odd, maybe I had too much caution left over from the corridor. Good results on the compass, ended up in the wrong reentrant on the second control, but easily recognized the error. The contour-only controls were fun, there was a fair bit of single-contour navigation, which I'm getting better at managing.

Afternoon training session at PWF. This was a route choice exercise with paired runners. I was paired with Ben, one of the two FUMA cadets that self-seeded into the long advanced. We were instructed to plan all of our legs beforehand, and then go out and execute. The first to arrive at each control would wait for the second. That way, there would be a leg-by-leg comparison of the two routes.

This worked out a lot better than I had thought. The meet-up at each control was key, because it injected competition on every leg, erased past mistakes, and forced you to commit to your route choice.

I won the first 4 legs, but I had to work at it. My original route choices worked out well, and Ben had some trouble executing. Kudos to him for good recoveries, but I think my choices were safer, and safety can clearly add to speed.

At #4, it was getting late, and we decided do 5-6 and skip 7-8. I went over my route to #5, then proceeded to navigate straight to 6. No Ben in sight, so I sat down and waited. And waited. Began to look at the map. Gradually came to the reailzation that I was at the wrong control, ran back to 5, apologized to a patient Ben, then tried to retrace my route back to 6, but he beat me there too. Good on him, bad on me, and we jogged back to the finish together.

Later that night, Addie took Ben on an adventurous Night-O run wading through Quantico Creek while I stayed back in the lodge and enjoyed good food and a beer. She alertly recognized the symptoms of hypothermia (which included lots of verbalizations of extreme cold feelings) and brought them both back without incident.