Training Log Archive: bensmith

Bonus WJR at Robert Burnaby. Didn't think I'd be able to run this due to family being in town, but they were delayed by 24 hours due to BA's IT meltdown.

Fun course by Kate, but unfortunately it involved running up a hill. Despite my warm weather training in Kamloops last weekend, I still can't run in these temperatures...

Scouting out potential new sprint map location.

Forest run with Team TRIUMF

10 minutes warmup
25 minutes steadily increasing pace
10 minutes cooldown

My Garmin graphs look awesome for the middle part of this run. Pace increase pretty steadily from 5:00/km to 4:00/km, while cadence tracks it perfectly from 180spm to 190spm.

World Orienteering Day at Queen Elizabeth Park.

I didn't run, but had an awesome time. So many new people. So many happy faces. So much time in the sunshine.

ParticipACTION funded the event, so we were able to make it free for everyone. They also gave us free swag to give out - thanks!

We did a format of 4 short loops, which worked perfectly. Allowed people to do as much or as little as they wanted, and highlighted a few things people were doing wrong before they'd been out for too long (e.g. running S-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-F instead of S-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-F....). Everyone who had issues went out for a second loop, did better, and then went away with a more positive impression. Sweet!

We had 99 people/groups run at least 1 loop. 38 people ran all 4 loops.



Technicals

I set it up in MeOS as a 4-leg relay, with all legs by the same person, any course allowed on any leg, and all legs with an "assigned" start time (MeOS speak for "use the start punch, rather than the handover time"). This meant people could run in any order, and reduced congestion at the start. MeOS automatically created a "Team" for each person when you created an entry for them (even when typing their name in the first time they downloaded). Once an SI stick was associated with a person, it remembered that for the other legs, speeding things up massively. We had a bit of a queue at download early on, as I had to type quite a few names in, but it got more efficient later on. The only way we could improve this is if we have 2 laptops, connected via a network, and the registration team use the other laptop to associate names to SI sticks. I should probably learn how to do that before our next big event.

MeOS worked flawlessly for everybody except:
* John Rance, who it insisted on overwriting Leg 1 for each time he downloaded, rather than moving onto Legs 2 and 3. I have no idea what went wrong for him!
* Two people who came late and were given SI sticks that had previously been used by other people. Sometimes we're too efficient at tidying up...

Results are interesting, as we don't actually care about the relay leg-by-leg comparison, but the course-by-course comparison instead. This isn't really what the IOFXML format is designed for, and I'm not sure if AP/winsplits will do what we want. I'll probably have to massage the XML files to better reflect the event. UPDATE: OE CSV format FTW :)

Final spring OAK session.