Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Probably the best that can be said for this run is that it demonstrated that I'd given yesterday everything that I had. (Not getting home until 11.30 - or 1.30am NZ time - after a delayed flight probably didn't help, although at least one presumes that no WMOC people were on the mid-afternoon Jetstar flight which ended up being 10 hours late...).

The day had got off to such a positive start too - went to the newsagent just after opening time to get the paper and was behind someone who was there to collect his winnings from division 2 of Tattslotto, and was clearly very pleased about it. (I'm not sure what division 2 of Tatts is worth these days but I'm guessing several thousand - too much for them to pay out on the spot, at any rate).

I then spent the later part of the day watching Essendon (in person) and the Brumbies (on TV) performing in the afternoon much as I had in the morning.

WMOC long final, 17th. I'd have taken that result before the start of this week (and even more so before the start of last week) after a difficult summer; it wasn't a perfect run and I never felt especially sharp, but kept plugging away and the only major time loss was 90 seconds or so on the low-visibility 23 (a control which troubled others too, most notably Grant who thinks he lost 10 minutes there).

2 was a long leg largely on tracks which gave me a chance to plan and settle after a somewhat unconfident 1. In general I used tracks a lot, partly for safety, partly because, although the coastal macrocarpa was very open underneath, I expected that going up and down the dunes would be draining after a while. Eric went through me at 7 (a bit earlier than I'd expected, so he must have started well), then I started seeing a lot more people after 14 when we got into the area where people who started from start 2 went (tried not to get rattled by the proportion of them who were running faster than me). The train went through me at 18 but this one definitely wasn't stopping at my station (contained three coming from behind me, plus the fast-but-erratic Swede who started two minutes before me whom I must have gone through at some stage, and I seemed to be tiring a bit in the last 20 minutes.

Probably couldn't have got above 14th even with a good run. As noted above Grant had a bad run, and Jon must have too because he was about 5 minutes behind me after being that margin ahead of me in both qualifiers. Eric best Australian at 11th; Ivaylo Ivanov beat Carsten by 10 seconds with a time around 65.

It's a little unusual to have as much a feature race of the season as a WMOC final so early in the year. Will probably have a fairly quiet week before launching back into training, with some level of confidence that my body can now support a reasonable training load. Doing NSW Championships in two weeks (21s in the middle, 45s in the long) and QB3, but otherwise most of what I'm building to from here is in late winter or spring.

Bizarre stat of the day: #23, my most significant error of the day navigation-wise, was my best split placing of the day (12th). (The AP splits show me with a bigger time loss on #5 and #7, but #5 was mostly a route choice, #7 was getting caught in some green).

When virtually the entire field in a WMOC A final, which presumably contains some competent navigators, loses time on a control (Ivaylo Ivanov did in the 1.20s and no-one else broke 2), it does make you think something was a bit odd. (My feeling is that it was probably the mapping of the vegetation boundary, which I and probably most others used as an attack point, relative to the control feature). Doesn't take away from an excellent event.

Long - Final - Men 45 Final A - Splits

No formal training today, but some walking (not as much as the Tongariro Crossing day), going out to Rangitoto Island with Jenny, Bruce and John. Somewhat chaotic getting there (first they told us that the 10.30 ferry was full and we'd have to wait until 12.15, then a couple of minutes later they announced they were bringing in a backup vessel), but nice once there.

It's the youngest volcano of the Auckland region, coming into existence about 600 years ago (no doubt much to the surprise of the then recently-settled Maori) and has only really become vegetated in the last 150 years, although there are still scattered areas of bare lava fields. I've been here before, on the 2005 trip, but was a bit limited in what I could do on that occasion with only one functional arm.

I gather a certain amount of work has been done in the emergency-management field as to what to do if a new volcano appears somewhere in the Auckland region (an entirely plausible scenario on geological timescales, if somewhat less probable in our lifetimes). I presume somewhat less planning has been done on a re-run of the 2nd/3rd century Lake Taupo eruption, as the only strategy which has any reasonable chance of success in that scenario is not to be in New Zealand (or at best to be in the south end of the South Island).

I've been doing a bit of work in idle times while here in gathering files for completing the OA results archive (and trying to track down results which have disappeared down dead weblinks - if any of the WA crowd know where the 2006 national carnival results are hiding, I'd be interested to know about it, although the sprint is on Winsplits and I already have the long and the schools, so the relays and the WA Champs are the only ones completely missing from my perspective). Some of the searches done during this process have taken me to the list of Australian orienteers who have Wikipedia pages. I get the impression a certain amount of piss-taking was involved in the creation of Grant's.

C • Archiving 4

WMOC second long qualifier. Did the necessary today with a generally conservative run - only needed to avoid major errors and did so, on an area which (in its first half) was steeper and more physical than yesterday. Only major time loss was perhaps 1.5 minutes on 13, on a combination of an unnecessarily wide route choice, drifting mid-leg and some hesitation in the circle. Was fairly cautious to make sure I knew what was up and what was down (not always easy on this map); will be interesting to see how I handle things with a more aggressive gear on Saturday. Steady physically but knew afterwards that I'd put in two pretty solid days.

Ended up qualifying 15th, at the head of a close bunch; will be happy if I can repeat that result on Saturday. To get to the top 10 will need an excellent run and probably some blowouts above me. Given that two weeks ago my goals were simply to make the two A finals, I'm reasonably happy with how the week has gone so far and feel as if I've got back to around where I was at nationals time last year, which is progress of a sort.

C • 15th 1

Long - Qualification 2 - Men 45 Heat 1 - Splits

WMOC first long qualifier at Woodhill. A couple of annoying mistakes late and lacking in pace, but 19th, 8 minutes inside the cut line (32nd), which should be more than enough barring disaster tomorrow. (Disaster in second WMOC long qualifiers has been known to happen).

2 was a long leg out to the coastal strip and I initially set off up the wrong track through the green (the real one being almost invisible) but picked it up fairly soon. Lacked confidence on the coastal strip - although we only had one control in the yellow, the scars of Wellington last year are still there - and was picked up by Rolf (1 minute) and Jon (2 minutes) by 3. Ran the next section pretty well and slipped back through those two when they missed 7 a little (Jon subsequently got through me on the long leg at 9, Rolf didn't). The last third was in the more standard pines - missed what should have been the easy 10 a little high (20 seconds or so), then had annoying 1-minuters at 14 and 16, not seeing the latter in the pampas grass despite going very close to it. Found something for the chute to get under 70. Carsten won in 54 (and I don't think Sticks, who had a good run, has claimed my scalp too many times before).

I wasn't amongst those called up for a drug test. One wonders if the way this works is that if you're old enough (say, over 70) and you don't test positive to anything, you're under suspicion for fibbing about your age.

Long - Qualification 1 - Men 45 Heat 1 - Splits

WMOC model event - a chance to explore the flatter bits of Woodhill and get a feel for some of the key aspects. Most of my NZ sanddune experience has been in Wellington, so the macrocarpa strip along the coast was different to what I expected - high trees with excellent visibility (definitely unlike Wellington). Another thing which is a bit different is that in Wellington the flat areas are very flat and their boundaries are often useful features, but at Woodhill the detail is more evenly spread - potentially unforgiving if you come unstuck.

Felt sluggish running, but that's often the way for a model event. Stopped off at Muriwai Beach on the way; a substantial proportion of Auckland's population was also there, it being a sunny public holiday.

WMOC sprint final. More of a running race than yesterday - particularly the park bits in the first few controls, but even the campus bits weren't as challenging as yesterday - certainly nothing remotely resembling a 'you can't there from here' leg today, and legs which I expected to have traps (e.g. the northwest approach to 11) didn't.

That didn't suit me as much as the second half of yesterday did, and I don't think I was running quite as well as yesterday either. Not quite precise on the early legs, and a couple of non-optimal routes (8 and 18) which perhaps cost me 5-10 seconds apiece, but fundamentally I wasn't competitive on speed. That was apparent early on, with Francois Leonard catching me at 9; we were around each other at various times through the rest of the course as he started making mistakes.

Ended up 25th, only beating three people apart from the mispunches, which is about the level this run was at.

I might not have had the greatest of days but many of my compatriots did (starting with Grant, who won our class). There were no fewer than 12 Australian gold medals out of a possible 23; no other country won more than two.

Sprint Final - Men 45 Final A - Splits

A couple of times in the last week I've been thinking that in my current form I was probably 1-2 minutes away from the qualifying cutoff in the World Masters sprint. That much was true, but what I wasn't expecting was that that was going to be 1-2 minutes (1.44 to be precise) on the right side of the cutoff - as it turned out, the first time I've qualified comfortably since 2011 (after scraping through with 10-15 seconds to spare in 2012, 2014 and 2015).

This was certainly a better run than either of my previous sprints on this trip. I feel as if my running has started to turn a bit of a corner in the last few days, and found the right pace for my current fitness level early on. The other aspect was to make sure I minimised my time loss, on a course which became very technical in the second half with many route-choice traps, and that mission was accomplished, with the only time losses being a few seconds where I wasn't absolutely sure a gap was legal and took the conservative option. Lots of runners around, and tried not to be too distracted by people on other courses, especially flying Kiwis (Alistair Cory-Wright in M50 went past me a few times); never saw anyone in my own class.

As an early starter, the next step was to see whether the run would be enough; it always looked like it would probably fall on the right side, but it took until the last quarter of the start list to be sure. Watching a marginal qualification situation involves looking at the number of remaining starters, knowing how many of them you need to beat and ticking off likely candidates; I wouldn't have put Carsten in that list, but he picked up the wrong map at the start and lost 3 minutes going back for the right one, finishing 10 seconds or so behind me. He'll set an early benchmark tomorrow.

The technical second half of the course definitely suited me more than the running race in Rotorua; I was 37th at control 13 (32nd is the cutoff), but 9th over the remainder of the course. Now to see what tomorrow brings. Having not expected to qualify I didn't bring any real expectations, but now that I have qualified, beating my qualifying result (20th) is the target.

Lots of good Australian results today, particularly but not only from the younger classes, and I think we can reasonably expect at least three or four gold medals tomorrow.

Sprint Qualification - Men 45 Heat 1 - Splits

Event: World Masters Orienteering Championships 2017
 

Stayed at Mount Maunganui last night, a place I had previously associated principally with 1 January news stories which begin "(insert large number here) people were arrested...". There was rather less debauchery (or evidence of recent debauchery) on display on an early morning in April, just a long beach to the Mount - the driftwood always makes NZ beaches, even in developed resorts like this - seem wilder than ours.

Headed up with Jenny to the base of the Mount; the track around the base is still closed due to landslides and neither of us fancied taking on the summit (the summit track was busy with walkers in any case), so we came back on the port side. Felt quite lively at times this morning - certainly more so than yesterday - which is a positive sign for tomorrow.

Headed up to Auckland during the rest of the day, as we did a passenger swap - I was rejoining my family, whilst Bruce was seeing the rest of his off at the airport. This transaction involved my getting the train up from the outer southern suburbs to where my parents are staying; the Auckland suburban rail system has certainly had a fair bit of work done on it (especially its stations) since I was last in these parts in 2005. Knowing the demographics of that part of town, it certainly didn't surprise me that there was only one other pakeha on the platform. (Apparently one of the challenges for Auckland public transport has been to convince whites that the trains aren't just for Maori and Pacific Islanders, a legacy of the fact that most of the main lines serve the heavily Maori/Islander southern suburbs).

Back into the redwoods with Jenny and Zara. The plan was to try to get to the top of the hill but we didn't quite work out the trail network (at this point we were off the orienteering map) and ended up coming from 3/4 of the way up the hill back down to the bottom, at which point we decided a second attempt was unwarranted. Certainly a very nice forest to run in and we weren't the only people doing it by any means. Strangely, I was struggling on the gentle climbs but handling the steeper ones (including stairs) much better.

I'd begun to suspect that my Garmin's distance measurement was beginning to behave somewhat erratically, and the fact that my distance was 500 metres shorter than Zara's tends to confirm that (the redwoods probably aren't hugely conducive to satellite detection either).

Spent the rest of the day making our way slowly to Mount Maunganui via various Rotorua attractions (although only once, at the gondola/luge place, did we partake in the numerous local opportunities to spend copious quantities of money).

C • Garmin 4