Training Log Archive: HGaston

Event: NEOC Heart and Troll Revival A-Meet
 

Day one of the NEOC A-meet. I had a fairly mediocre run....

I had trouble getting into the map at the beginning. On the first control, I had a ton of hesitation and had to stop and re-establish contact with the map. Controls 2 and 3 I actually found quite quickly, but I nearly didn't check both of them because I was slightly off to the side and didn't think they were mine. The run just felt rough and controls felt lucky.

I did fairly well on the longer legs more towards the middle of the run. But I lost time on some short legs that should have been simpler. Control 12 was my worst mistake of the run, and the only timeloss that wasn't primarily because of hesitation. I ended up on a somewhat parallel spur north of the feature that I was trying to find, and it took me awhile to relocate.

The legs got longer as the course went on, so as I started to orienteer better, I also started to get physically more tired.

I guess things just felt off & I made some significant mistakes, but the greatest one was probably 6 minutes--it used to take me longer to relocate.

The terrain was *very* hilly, with loose rocks hidden under leaves on the slopes that made contouring a bit tricky. There was a really beautiful view of the whole valley on one of the legs that almost made me stop for a moment :).

It was wonderful to see everyone again! I miss you guys :).

Red Day 1 - Splits

We learned back rolls from standing (this was fun discounting the first time I tried it and almost crashed into the wall), a couple more release motions, practiced the full walk, and practiced dodging.

Greenwood run. I almost stepped on a very recently killed squirrel because I was too focused on reading the map. I guess this is good training for not running into trees, etc.

Ran with the Cascades map from Australia. It's the most difficult map I've ever run on. There are boulders everywhere, and the contours are somewhat subtle in places. The key I think is to navigate off of the large bare rock slabs.

C • bare rock 9

Ping-pong w/ Jana in the union...we're thinking about being an intramural doubles team :).

I'm painting wyoming on my laptop. It makes me happy :).

C • ping pong 2

Two major mistakes; one was atrocious (parallel error which caused me to mix up spurs and run an inordinate distance for no reason). The other would have been atrocious had the other one not been so much moreso. My second error I think mostly came from not paying attention at the end of the race. I was focused on trying to get in close to 10 mins/km and then of course didn't concentrate enough on actually navigating to finish off the race....

Most of the intervening 13 controls were good. I bobbled a few & spiked a handful.

The time is mostly right, but I don't know the seconds.

Control pick-up w/ Mallory. We picked up a handful of white & yellow controls and a few orange ones.

Navigating to the start, which was a fair distance from the assembly area/finish. It was interesting because there wasn't a streamered path/set path to take, but the official time didn't start until you reached the start. I ended up having to jump through an uncrossable river because I didn't initially noitice I should've crossed it early.

Distance is made up, for the shoes.

More control pick-up. I picked up a couple of the red controls (...and one of them was the one I did badly on in the race :)).