Training Log Archive: W

Basic orienteering course in the morning. Not happy about my bearings, and most definitely not happy about my distance gauging. Too many controls where I was generally going in the right direction, but assumed I had gone way further than I had, which made we wander off in the wrong direction. My brain matched up the incorrect terrain to the map simply because I really wanted it to be right.

Direction out of controls was also not great.

If I were unhappy about this morning, I was less happy about the afternoon's THOMASS race. The first control was fine, then the rest were just not smooth. The first two I climbed too much or started getting restless about not finding the control simply because I hadn't descended enough. Then the flat ones were again a product of poor compass bearings, I was generally in the right direction, but got cold feet and went off on a tangent when I felt I was no longer on track. Is this a product of poor bearings? Or poor confidence in poor bearings? I don't feel that I CAN trust my compass, but when I don't, I discover I was better off sticking to it.

C • map contact? 1

SURPRISE! Evening intervals. Got back to Canmore, and the guys were heading out to do some uphill intervals on the Canmore Challenge course. So, what does a guy do? Slam a chicken pot pie, and go hammer them out. Didn't regret the pot pie, but did get rather tired.

AOA training camp, several exercises, terrible bearings, blah blah blah. Same ol' same ol'.

Just one orienteering exercise today at the training camp. Would have liked to do the morning exercise but the "MASTER COACHES" who promised to leave the controls up let people take them down anyway! JERKS! I can only assume its some sort of secret ploy to prevent me from training. Definitely a conspiracy.

Orienteering training around somewhere... near Cranbrook. Ran with my sister and tried to do what some might call "coaching". I likely did more harm than good.

Tent Ridge run. We spent the first 45 minutes just trying to find the trail head, took two wrong routes, then eventually found the correct one. A mere 30 minutes up and we encountered not a small amount of snow. So it turned into a lot of slogging through the snow. Not super fast, but lots of climb, and probably a bit of exercise.

Blasted around Canmore for 45 minutes, and they still moaned about going too slow.

Ran up to the nordic centre to record a head cam video of the Canmore Challenge course in a few weeks time. Should be fun, though I'm not actually going to be there.

So, this morning, Kris said, "we're going to do a two hour run". Turns out "two hour run" means the uphill part of a much longer hike. We went over to mount allen and ran to the top of the mountain, which conveniently took just about two hours. This was followed by hiking the rest of the horseshoe to another peak and then heading back down the ridgeline and home, which took another 4 hours. It was a lovely day and a pretty tough workout. These guys seem to love to make every workout as cutthroat as possible. Run everything at a pretty high pace, try to drop your training partners, etc. etc. They seem to do everything at quite a high intensity. And, shock and awe, they're all injured all the time.

I'm not going to add the other 4 hours of hiking afterwards.