Took a little while to get back into the groove of thinking for orienteering but by the end I had good flow and everything was going well. Massive mistakes at the beginning though... yikes
Coming into the race I felt really good physically. I didn't have any pain anywhere, had slept well, and was hydrated.
Mentally I was a bit of a mess. I felt calm, but I think that was more from a "lack of plan" kind of calm where I was just going out there to run, with only a vague plan: start slow and build.
The first problem with this plan was that I didn't do a good job following through. I wanted to stay with one guy o. My team who tends to do a good job building but I messed up and in the first 800m flew away from him. Then when I hit the first mile I was 20 seconds faster than I wanted to be: 4:47 instead of 5:05.
From there I didn't know ow to react. As an attempt to follow my plan I slowed down but that made me just continuously slow down more and more as the race went by.
That leads me to the second part of my mental prep that I messed up. Because I didn't have much of a plan I wasn't prepared for any deviation of the little planning that I had. So when I went out too hard on the first mile I wasn't mentally ready to do what I should have done: hang on as long and hard as I could.
As the race progressed I continuously was making weak decisions and I didn't have any motivation to kill myself and finish strong. So I got passed by probably 20-30 people in the last 300m.
The last part that hurt me mentally was me being scared of getting heatstroke. Last weekend it took a lot out of me and I tried to convince myself that I could just go out there and run till I died but the thought of getting heatstroke again scared me like getting a concussion playing soccer. And so even though I came prepared with a cooler of cold water and was well hydrated before, it was always in the back of my head and kept me from pushing my limits.
I will try to update my training log, I now have a little bit more time after school and have my life under control :D
3 PM
Run warm up/down 20:00 [2]
4 PM
Run tempo 21:00 [4] 6.0 km (3:30 / km)
1min rest between each interval. All intervals had one 15sec sprint randomly placed 1,2,3,4,5,4,3,2,1
I was really hot so I didn't want to push myself past my limit. I decided to run hard for up to the second 4 and then rest and run on the 2 and 1 again