Training Log Archive: hughmac4

Fished in Stone Harbor with hughmac3 in the surf. Beautiful day, only ONE smallish bluefish in a few hours. Fun fight on the noodle rod! I'll be trying that more in the future. You can cast it a mile.

Then drove up to my room at Bear Mountain Inn, Scenic Overlook. AWESOME ... until Saturday night when the frat/sorority kids moved in at 12:30am and partied until 4:30am. Oof. I would still stay there again, and next time call the front desk until things were settled. I figured it was payback for my own rude indiscretions of my twenties. :)

I missed Juliet & June. If I had known the weather was going to be so perfect I definitely would have dragged them along to play lakeside at Buckner.

Event: QOC & SVO: McKeldin - The Stumble
 

home > cemetery (5 laps) > home

sluggish, just needed to get out. Glad I did.

Worst offenders from yesterday:

#2 - 3min (poor compass work combined with scale/bad pacing = confusion)
#4 - 6min (pacing/scale = big confusion)
#5 - 8min (utter frustration = chicken w/o head syndrome, just go faster doesn't work)
#6 - 3min (complete second guessing here)
Total - 20min

Probably another couple of minutes after that due to complete lack of confidence in everything I was doing, throbbing knee, ripped and untied gaiters, and bad karma. At least I didn't fall the one time I slipped badly in the middle of a rock field at speed.

French Creek East -- Red Course

Distance Run: 6.53mi (hahah ... 10.5k or 144% of course length)

Incredibly great day weather-wise, and Juliet & June came along and did the White course -- June's first orienteering adventure! That's about where the good times stopped for me.

Route 1 was closed for some kind of work, so we were stuck in traffic on 76W for ages (it seemed like), arriving in the nick of time to head out at 1pm. Long jog to the start. Felt LATE. So started off hard, and kept making major mistake after major mistake -- and I mean truly major -- check out my GPS track, and RouteGadget should be a hoot.

I felt completely off the map. Running around in circles. A couple of careful, slowly-walking pace-counters beat me on two legs in a row. I felt like an idiot, couldn't figure out what was wrong ... and didn't remember until after the race that FCE is 1:15K. Really. I haven't made that mistake in ... a while. If ever? Wow. Just wow.

Woods were tough, as FCE always is. Climb tough. Visibility was probably about as good as it gets, but still tough for me, particularly the leaves on the rocks ... I'm generally pretty good on FC rocks, but they were still pretty well covered with leaves. I found myself doing a lot of stumbling, fell a few times, and bopped my knee into the end of a log pretty hard, it's bruised but probably not anything long-term.

Control analysis isn't really necessary ... pretty much all incorrect pace and or poor compass work. I would have been faster if I had walked. Maybe then I would have noticed the map scale. :)

C • Courage 2

Think I might do the Hawk Mountain sprints instead of FCE next weekend ... what's everyone else doing? I LOVE FCE ... but I didn't go last year, and they are the same courses. Or maybe I'll do a NC, just to get out there on FCE ... hmm. Well, we'll see what the weather is like I suppose, and what the ladies want to do.

C • DOINGS 2

Also noticed that FCE from last year is up on RouteGadget still, in case anyone wanted to take a look. And Andis went out of bounds from 2 to 3 so should be DQ. :)

Are we REALLY re-running these courses? Was there some insane weather event that I'm not remembering? Winning time on YELLOW of 55 minutes? Red 86 minutes? Wow. Just purely a 'fight' issue?

Gym down to the end of boathouse row and back. Incredible day, felt HOT in the sun!

That was Florin Tencariu in the DVOA shirt whom I was with for the middle section of the race before the 5 > 6 mile hill, where he pulled away. Nice job Florin!

Event: Mt. Penn Mudfest 15k trail run
 

Mt Penn Mudfest ... beautiful sunny day, perfect for about first half of the race then got pretty hot, but I'm not complaining!

Dad won M70+ (yeah!) and I beat my -9min/mi pace/top 10% goals (74/825). Good fun in the woods, felt really strong on the downhills and obstacles (streams, rocks, logs, etc), pretty sluggish up the hills. Only walked the last big hill (6.6>6.7), but had plenty of extremely slow uphill bits throughout the course.

Saw a few other DVOAers ... Karl, Chris Gross, and another guy I should know, but don't know his name.

Shoes again performed spectacularly. Yay Inov-8!

C • Congratulations! 5