Training Log Archive: Arnold

Orienteering race, St. Germain.

A crap forest, lots of green and especially nasty brambles plus a 5 year old, not very good map. Plus a control totally in the wrong place.

Lost 10 minutes altogether, but it was quite fun as there was a fair bit of path running

Came 4th, 4 minutes down

Orienteering Race, Barbizon.

Very different terrain to St Germain, hilly this time and lots of rock and fern. Impossible to run in places. A fun race even though the course could have been more technical. Got really tired towards the end and lost quite a bit of time on path running sections, but thankfully only about 5 minutes in total loss technically

3rd place, 4 minutes down

Orienteering Race (sprint), Bois le Roi

Very easy technically (open parkland mostly), so no mistakes but just totally tired, especially on second half (lost 8 seconds on Abi on first half, 2 minutes on second half)

about 15th place or so, 4 minutes down

So it happened that there were 3 races on around Paris on the same day, and I decided to do all of them - the longest course each time of course.

It was a bit tight timewise between the first and second one as they were an hour apart and starts were 9:30-12:00 each time, but I sneaked in just before the end and started a little after 12. The third one was easy, it was on all day.

A fun experience even though doing a sprint race last is not a brilliant idea, because I didn't feel much like sprinting. Quite happy about the runs, the first one wasn't very clean but the map and terrain were dodgy, the second one was pretty clean and I hung on mentally despite being really tired. The third run wasn't much fun anymore but at least it wasn't very long.

To and from Parc Montsouris. On road, but not too bad (at least the pavements are wide!)

Sprint race, Parc Montsouris, set by Neil. Somehow it turns out that an O map exists of this park near home that we have run in for the past 2 years. Somehow it turns out that there are permanent controls out there as well, but as they are wooden stakes without flags that are mostly hidden in the undergrowth, we had never seen any of them...

Took more time to punch (control card plus fiddly punch in the wooden stake) than to run, but fun nonetheless!

it was 11:30 at night but I just had to go out and loosen up the legs...

2 sets