Training Log Archive: RLShadow

Powder Mills Red course.

Distance is the distance covered per GPS. Straight-line distance was 6.1 km.

Did really badly. When I saw the clue sheet and saw that there were 18 controls, I mentioned to Anne and Paul with whom I road down, "That gives me 18 chances to mess up", and I certainly took advantage of all of the opportunities to do so!

Did OK on 1 and 2, then took the non-swamp route to 3 which I am certain was a mistake, because it involved some climb and was slow going in spots, not to mention more distance. Had trouble with 4, probably lost a good 5 minutes or more, I see that it might have been misplaced but I don't look at that as a real good excuse because I was sloppy anyway. I did find the rootstock with the streamer but no control, didn't know what to do so I climbed back UP the hill (just what I needed was more climb on the course) to try to find an attack point. Finally, with the aid of some other orienteers, I found the flag. I was particularly chagrined to have this much trouble on a control that was shared with Yellow!

Did OK on 5, 6, and 7, but then didn't read the contours coming out of 7 and climbed more than I needed to (again). OK on 8, but took a very non-optimum route to 9. Found it OK but once again climbed more than I needed to and went slower than I should have. OK on 10, 11, and 12, just slow going, paying a lot of attention to the map to avoid another major screw up. OK on 13 but again didn't pay enough attention to the contours and climbed more than I needed to.

Took a longer but dry route to 14, then made a strategic mistake in choosing a route to 15 (went a more roundabout way to try to minimize climb, but then realized I really didn't reduce the climb, I just ran further -- real smart). It looked on the map like 15 was a bit further north than it actually was, so I wound up missing it and continuing north along the shore looking for it. I bet I lost 5 minutes on it, really dumb because it was so readily visible. Was distracted by someone else coming in around the same time and took a slightly different route into the control than I might otherwise have taken, but that's no excuse. Also lost time coming out of 15, trying to be clever and save some climb but it didn't work.

OK on 16, just slow going climbing up the hill. Then my mind must have been totally disengaged because I got on the wrong trail and lost a lot of time getting to 17. All in all, one of my worst orienteering days in a long time. But it was a good physical workout at least! And with the exception of #4, I could tell in retrospect where I messed up and what I should have done instead, so hopefully some learning happened.

Field checking Dryer Road Park, with Karl Kolva's assistance. He has a 2-person system that seems to be pretty accurate for mapping trails; unfortunately, it is very slow, so in 4 hours today, we probably got about 20% of the trails covered. The GPS tracks from Rob helped a lot. In many cases, we were pretty much confirming what the tracks said, in which case we should have gone faster than we did. In other cases, things were a bit different. In one case, way different, but we figured out that our field checking was what was off, not the GPS tracks, and we re-did the trail. To get a usuable map for the upcoming meet, I'm going to be relying much more on Rob's tracks as opposed to covering all of the trails at the pace that Karl and I did this morning. Especially for trails like the Owl's Maze which really isn't very useful for anything (not for navigation, not for getting from point A to point B, and not for control placement).

Last long run before Rochester Marathon. With Anne. Left from my house, to Maple, Klem, Bay, Lake, Hojack Trail to North Ponds Park, 250, Orchard, Holt, Klem, Hard, Hojack Trail to Lake Rd, Lake, Bay, Backus, DeWitt, to home. Many walking breaks, especially during the last half of the run, but it seemed a little less time spent walking than our last long run. The distance and times include the walking breaks.

Running trails at Fort Hill and some of Ganandagon to obtain GPS tracks to confirm previously mapped trails, now that Rob has shown me how to get tracks from the Forerunner into a form usable in OCAD.

C • I find that amusing 2

Course setting at Fort Hill and Ganandagon.