Training Log Archive: HGaston

Cool and misty out :).

I ran Battle Park to Bolin Creek (the controls are still in the woods!), then along Hillsborough Street and up the GIANT hill back to campus, around campus, past a couple of fields where a combination of little kids with soccer balls and serious-looking players in uniforms were milling around, down the hill at Greenwood and through that person's yard into Battle Park again, back to Bolin Creek and then back to school.

I need to find a long loop that doesn't double back on itself so often.

I was going to run along the Greenway, but I got stuck in so many traffic lights on Cameron that I got annoyed and went into the woods.

I was reading the Day 2 Red map from the NEOC A-meet last year....and I looked up, and there was a control in the woods. In Battle Park.

This was kind of like finding a sandwich on Mars.

I stopped running and went over to the control. There was another one further on, and they had 866 Gaitors labels on them.

There is another orienteer here?

They have a map of Battle Park?

In a manner of speaking.

Warm-up, cool-down, and recovery running in between the 400's.

5x 400 at the track, aiming for 88's.

In between the 400's I jogged and read a course from CO, really trying to translate it into a visual image of the terrain instead of just reading the symbols, if that makes sense.

Did the same while waiting in line earlier today, with a Sass Peepre training map. It had some cool negative terrain.

...I'm avoiding chem lab.

In the soccer field, after running.

Run in the pouring rain :-).

I was going to bring a map from a Canadian junior camp, but the rain would've destroyed it and I would've had to read it by street lamps.

I passed a lot of people huddled under balconies, umbrellas, doorways. Puddles on the brick sidewalks.

Generally awesome.

Ping-pong in the basement with Jana, Josh, Jon, and Zach :).

Unfortunately we couldn't play doubles because we only had three paddles, so it didn't quite reach the level of chaos that it did last year. But it was fun. We're thinking of having a tournament some time next week.

Two NE block loops and Battle Park & back. I read a tricky Finnish map that Gabe gave me a couple of summers ago.

It had some ridiculously long legs, so I practiced finding intermediate attackpoints. Also worked on map memory, reading the map for a moment and then visualizing what it would look like in the real world.

...I also vaguely worked on folding the map in a slightly less destructive way than usual :).

Next time I might bring out a compass and practice distance judgment & thumbing at the same time, and/or listening to music or chemistry lectures while map-running in order to practice focusing despite distractions.

C • Less Destructive map folding 8

CLP meeting today, and we debriefed the meet they went to yesterday. Apparently people got 'hundreds of ticks'. Yikes!

mmmm...back from Rochester.

I had an awesome time, but it was also an eye-opener that I need to get more serious about training again, especially the navigational side. Actually, I mostly just need to focus, but that seems sort of nebulous.

I really enjoyed getting to know a handful of people that I've somehow never really met before...a lot of DVOA juniors, and Eddie, and Dennis from BAOC. And it was of course wonderful to see everyone else again too :-).

mmm....a handful of stunning realizations:

- I need to watch where I'm running...I got a stick in my eye (all the way in) today, so it seems I read the map too much while running. Map memory issue?

- "Straight is great" is only true in Wyoming. It probably wasn't necessary to run *through* that swamp in the middle distance instead of going around....or straight through the sinkhole...or on a 500-m bearing through featureless, flat white/green woods with no catching feature. The swamp actually looked decent on the map, and in Sweden it would have been a good route choice. The sinkhole looked decent in the terrain, but then I stepped in it and the ground wasn't really there.

- FOCUS!! This is a little ridiculous, but it's my biggest problem...specific errors this weekend: I ran right past the spectator control on the sprint because I was vaguely thinking about the fact that I don't like spectator areas and that Hannah was right with me and had started after me (yikes! :-)) instead of concentrating on the map and the fact that at 1:4000 things happen a lot more quickly than they do at 1/10.

This also happened after falling in the sinkhole on the middle...After having a pretty decent middle for the first 12 controls, I ran off into the oblivion looking for 13 with very little plan and only an approximate direction. ??? I hadn't been expecting to fall into a sinkhole, but orienteering is random (and that's one of the awesome things about it), and you can't lose focus when something out of the ordinary happens.

It happened on several of the Ultralong controls today, because I focus less during long legs where there is a lot of running time without decisions. The trouble is I started thinking about other things today at the same time, and then it's like half-listening to a conversation when suddenly the other person asks you a question. ...and then it's impossible to spike it.

It was frustrating to have errors/messy runs again after being pretty consistent this summer.

To fix these issues:

- Map runs (focus on map memory)
- Catching features
- Stay on a regular physical training schedule

Good things:

- I relocated pretty well, except for that control in the flat white/green woods because there were no features or contours to use. There were a lot of opportunities to relocate, especially on the Ultra Long, because of everything listed earlier...

- Good flow through controls, not a lot of slowing down while leaving.

- The Middle was fairly focused and strong until control 13 (of 14).

This is really long! Yikes.

C • Wow! 7

C • Course analysis 2

UltraLong: Green Y - Splits