Attackpoint - performance and training tools for orienteering athletes

Training Log Archive: Rosstopher

In the 31 days ending Oct 31, 2010:

activity	#	time	miles		km		+m
orienteering	10	9:21:25	54.05	(10:23)	86.99	(6:27)	1811
biking	14	5:31:45	60.91	(5:27)	98.03	(3:23)	232
Trail run	1	1:36:16	10.01	(9:37)	16.11	(5:59)	285
Road run	1	33:08	3.9	(8:30)	6.28	(5:17)	5
Total	25	17:02:34	128.88	(7:56)	207.41	(4:56)	2333
[1-5]	14	8:43:08

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Sunday Oct 31, 2010 #

Event: NEOC: Lincoln Woods

12 PM

orienteering 45:00 [5] 4.52 mi (9:57 / mi) +270m 8:24 / mi

Sam and I headed down to Lincoln Woods to help out at the NEOC meet. It's a very cool piece of terrain, but the map is a little old fashioned ( in mapping style) and I disagreed with at least one control placement. It's often hard for me to race well after spending the morning volunteering at the event. This was one of those days. Right out of the gate I failed to read the cliff at control 1 properly and wandered around trying to make sense of the area (some rocks were hidden under the circle, which didn't help). I was just generally sloppy for the rest of the course until 13 where the flag was simply not in the right spot. It a little too far away from the marsh and not on the very distinct cliff that it should have been on.

The woods were beautiful and open and there was lots of Halloween candy to consume. Ian's costume was absolutely fantastic! Also in the Halloween theme, I glued 4 devil horns to my forehead to contrast with Sam's angel costume.

Saturday Oct 30, 2010 #

8 AM

Trail run 1:36:16 [2] 10.01 mi (9:37 / mi) +285m 8:50 / mi

Yep, this was a semi-tragic case of getting there on the wrong day. Sam and I both glossed over the part of the website that mentioned the race was on Sunday so we were up and at 'em out in Framingham at 8:15 in the morning. When we discovered the error, we went for a run on our own and tried to find the trails. A really cool network of tracks once we managed to get into the woods.

A fun morning, and it feels good to get the run in so early with the rest of the day available for being productive. I spent several hours in the afternoon trying to organize my maps. I put many of them away in a binder, but there are so many years of maps to sort through and I didn't do a good job of writing the date on any of them.

The take home lesson here is that you should always write the date on the map... you also should drawn your route and make other notations as well... but if you have the date you can successfully arrange your binder later.

Friday Oct 29, 2010 #

9 AM

biking 20:09 [2] 4.34 mi (4:39 / mi) +3m 4:38 / mi

6 PM

biking 17:35 [2] 2.18 mi (8:05 / mi) +32m 7:43 / mi

Thursday Oct 28, 2010 #

9 AM

biking 19:21 [2] 3.91 mi (4:57 / mi) +4m 4:56 / mi

Heading into work. Spent a part of the morning refolding all of the controls that had been drying in our back room.

7 PM

biking 19:52 [2] 2.54 mi (7:49 / mi) +2m 7:48 / mi

Heading up to Sommerville to SGB's house. I'd been there before so I didn't think too much about how I was going to go and didn't print directions, remember the house number, or write down SGB's phone number. This was fine except I ended up in front of Katia and Giovanni's place ( I had a good memory of how to get there I guess) and then had to work my way a couple of blocks farther. Silly way of getting around really, I think Sam's going to explode sometime soon if I keep playing this game of " Oh I sort of know where I'm going, let's just see what happens" navigation with her in the car :)

C • Approximate navigation 2

orienteering 27:55 [4] 4.16 mi (6:43 / mi) +61m 6:25 / mi

A very fun Peg Orienteering course. We had a street map of the area and 11 possible controls. However not everyone would go to each control. At some points along the way you'd come to a control with x number pieces of tape. Each person that arrives to the control takes a tape and if the person takes a tape they must take the longer forking. If you get to the control and there is no tape left then you get to take the shorter forking (that is you get to skip the next control). The goal was to have the most tape pieces at the end.

We had a good crowd of runners, with Giacomo, Ross, Katia, Kilian, Ed, and Preston running and SGB, Alex and Presto cooking. Preston is a first time orienteer, and I hope that we will see him again at future events.

I ran well considering that I had forgotten my compass at home and had a mini-light. Map was sufficient but also not always perfect. The novelty of the format was brilliant and I liked seeing people out there more often then normal. I only just beat Katia back to the finish.

I hope we didn't intimidate Preston by talking too much about orienteering when we got back :)

C • Peg orienteering 7

C • Intimidation 1

Wednesday Oct 27, 2010 #

8 AM

biking 21:07 [2] 3.7 mi (5:42 / mi) +24m 5:36 / mi

Another day where biking was more expedient. But hey, on the plus side, I did crunches this morning for the first time in about a month. That's getting back on the wagon.

5 PM

biking 17:00 [3] 3.5 mi (4:51 / mi)

Biking home, picking up a few groceries on the way. Jeff and Kilian joined us for dinner tonight and we talked a lot about orienteering training. talking about training gives me so much motivation to go out and run, and to set up training camps and to be more involved.

here are some ideas for things that would be awesome.

1) a training camp in WOC 2012 relevant terrain the week after WOC 2011. This is a no brainer, really. Many of the teams will be doing this, logistically it's very easy this year because both locations are so close to each other.

2) an orienteering podcast with training ideas and commentary... basically someone reading okansas and world of o outloud :)

3) a complete schedule of events already prepared for the various training camps that will be held over the next coming months. This is partly my responsibility as I will be helping to maintain a complete list of training opportunities.

C • Ideas 12

Tuesday Oct 26, 2010 #

9 AM

biking 21:12 [2] 4.04 mi (5:15 / mi) +5m 5:14 / mi

Sheesh, this was going to be a good training week, but I guess it's still a mental recovery week. Biking to work, thinking about a presentation that I was making in the afternoon.

6 PM

biking 16:50 [2] 3.5 mi (4:49 / mi)
ahr:0 max:0

Rushing to get home and then headed out for date night with the lady friend. We ate Cambodian food at Elephant Walk which was a nice place to visit. Judy had forwarded me the Groupon for this restaurant in the middle of the summer and we just hadn't made time for it before now. I'm a big fan of the passion fruit mousse.... but the dessert queen wasn't as easily won over.

I feel a little bit guilty about missing the track session tonight, but I think that it was the right decision.

Monday Oct 25, 2010 #

8 AM

Road run 33:08 [2] 3.9 mi (8:30 / mi) +5m 8:28 / mi

Slept an okay amount and felt quite relieved to have the A-meet behind us. Also, when I got up, Neil was already awake and putting away the dishes from the dishwasher... all of our weekend house guests were so very polite and fun to have around.

Decided that I wanted to get some running in, so I ditched my bike in favor of my sneakers and headed off to work. Planned on running home too, but then I got caught up in the mouse colony work and it was pretty late so I just took the shuttle home instead.

I had a horrendous headache (dehydrated most likely) when I left the house and things were mostly sorted by the time I got to work... exercise is a decent vasodilator I guess.

C • headache 2