Training Log Archive: cporter

Core stuff

After my core class Joey and I were supposed to go out and run 5km, but it is quite cold and windy out and Joey has a nasty head cold so she had to drop down to walking after only 1km cause she couldn't breath. I kept on for another km, but it really was cold and I was only in a t-shirt and to be honest my heart wasn't into it so I called it quits too.

Event: DVOA Elk Neck
 

Event: QOC: Little Bennett
 

Red Course @ Little Bennet - back to Little Bennet for some daytime orienteering this time. The course went pretty well, no really major mistakes. Only stupid thing I did was to not aim off on my way to #4 and I hit the very non-descript stream which my control was hung along, but really wasn't sure which direction to head. Lost probably about a min due to indecision. I didn't really nail most of the controls, but since the woods were so wide open I spotted most of them from a fair distance. Wide open woods like that has a tendency to hurt me a bit too I think, since it is so open I think I try to run a bit too fast, don't pay enough attention to my bearing and then run off it by a lot more than I should. I did keep up decent speed through the woods, but with all of the deadfall (there was actually a fair amount of green and slash on the map, but visibility was really good so I kept deceiving myself into thinking I should be able to run faster than I was) my pace wasn't as fast as I had wanted it to be. Also, there was a fair amount of climb that was pretty evenly distributed throught out the course which slowed me a little (rarely was I running on flat ground.) Overall though a good day and good course.

Red - Splits

Event: QOC: Little Bennett - Night-O
 

Night-O at Little Bennet - this was such a fun event! My only regret is that I didn't run a longer course. I decided to take it easy on myself (after what I did to myself last weekend) and only ran the advanced short course, but I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more when I neared the end of my course. I only made one real mistake on my way to #3, which I think I can mostly attribute to a lack of confidence since it was the first leg of the course that (had I not made a mistake) my route choice involved no roads/trails. On my route I was supposed to cross a small, but not indistinct trail, which I never saw so rather than take a chance trying to find a point feature on the side of a rather bland hillside, I decided to just drop down till I hit a major trail that I knew I wouldn't miss and then took a bearing from there. It slowed me down and I was walking a lot because I was hesitant and also because the feature that I was looking for on the trail to attack the control from was about 20 ft off the trail as opposed to right on it - so I had to keep scanning the woods. But, I found what I was looking for (and earthbank on a very sharp bend in a stream) and found the control realatively easily, despite the massive fallen tree that was laying directly between me and the control when I spotted it (I'm not kidding it took me almost a min to get around the damn thing!) After that the rest of the race went pretty smoothly. On my way to #5 I was supposed to be running along the top of a hill line, but had drifted down the slope a bit - I knew this though and knew to keep scanning to my right and just contoured from where I was and still found the control fine, even from about 30 ft away. Also on my way to #7 I wasn't able to find the point on a trail that I wanted to attack the control from, so ran a bit further up the trail to attack, but still hit the control head on.

I was most pleasantly surprised with how much speed I was able to maintain through the woods, even in the dark with my not-the-greatest LED headlamp and only a little flashlight for a spotlight. There were definetly points at which I think I was running nearly as fast as I would during the daytime. Granted these woods are pretty wide open, but there are fallen trees and rootstocks everywhere so you still need to keep you eye on the ground! Definitely a really fun time! I only wish that we had more night-o's put on!

C • Wow. Nice pace for a Night... 3

Kickboxing

Kickboxing - all of the instructors at my gym must have collectively decided to step things up this week. Today's class was a killer, but it seems that the more a class makes me sweat the better it is. Adele not only gave us challenging stuff to do today, she kept the intensity really high, so my HR was up for nearly the entire time. Adele's favorite thing to do with us is to take activites that were once childhood activities and turn them into killer work outs. We always jump rope in class, but today she had us trying some freestyle moves, that I don't think I was ever able to do as a kid, but I managed to master most of them pretty quickly. Also, we played a modified version duck-duck-goose too. Rather than have one person chasing the goose, we all held hands in a circle, selected on person to be the "goose" and had one person on the outside of the circle running around trying to tag that person while we all shuffled around in the circle to prevent that from happening. It was really fun, and funny, and exhausting, esp. when you were the one chasing. We also had more traditional running drills to do today like doing 2 sets of sprints and then going right into push-ups, and then back to sprints (repeated 3x's). Of course there were all the usual suspects involved as well - squats, crunches, etc - but the introduction of some new stuff made the class really fun, even if it kicked my ass!