Training Log Archive: Oxoman

Christmas 5-Days Day 5 - Uni of Ballarat Sprint-O style.
This was a really great event as the culmination of the 5-Days. Fast and satisfying.
After a good night's sleep I felt like running and did. No problems with finding controls and main problem was not pushing hard enough on the long runs. Made one route choice error which looked like a good thing at the time but wasn't, but didn't cost me much anyway.
11-12 was a straight line distance of over a kilometre. Two distinct alternatives north or south of the straight line, or work your way between the buildings. I took the road run to the north. I didn't go south because the final approach looked to be slow and the barrier of buildings in front of the control meant you had to veer a fair way north if trying to go straight.
Amusing to see that the scale on the map indicates the gridlines to be 500m apart. That would put the leg at over 2km straight line. I took 8m37s and there is no way that I could sustain 4 minute kilometres uphill, not even with Phatmax as a pace setter; and I couldn't keep up with him on the leg. My Garmin recorded me as running 1.3 km via the roads.

C • The long leg 1

Day 4 of Christmas 5-Days - St Georges Lake.
Not a satisfying run.
After a poor night's sleep and an early start to set up the event site I felt sluggish and unmotivated to extend myself. Having spent the first hour and a half in the Finish tent I was last out on the course and was set up for failure based on previous events I have worked on. Made a parallel error and ran up the wrong gully to the first control but otherwise had a clean run. The course was an easy navigational exercise, made more so because many of the fluoro tags had been left in place at the control sites. No need for a control flag when there is a fluoro beacon 1m above the control stand! There were many really good control sites in complex terrain which were spoiled because the tag was visible from well outside the circle. The course was essentially a track run with short excursions into the erosion gullies. I had 7 controls of the 16 where I exited the circle and retraced my approach path back to a track.

Event: XMAS 5 Days
 

Heatdale Wetlands.