Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Mystery Blazes loop. Cool and dry, and much better energy level than last time.

Mystery Blazes loop, evening. It was pretty warm (about 67 F when I finished) and oppressively humid, raining at the end. Very low energy, probably due in large part to the fact that I didn't eat much the day before. For most of the run, I felt like I do at the end of a long O race when I've been doing well, but have used up most of my fuel, and know that I just have to keep trucking along as best I can to get a good result. The time shows it -- more than three minutes slower than I've been doing this recently. I brought the GPS and measured the route, and I went back and revised the recent runs, where I had guessed that this was 5 miles, to the correct shorter value. Now I'll try to figure out if there's any way to upload this GPS data to Attackpoint.

Hey, how about that! I updated my donation status, and now I've got one of those little globe things showing my route!

Baldwin Hill, Red. Not an especially clean race, and the mistakes that I made were in general quite avoidable, if I had just applied more careful technique. Figured I'd be 4th or 5th, and was quite surprised to find myself 2nd in M45, only 4 minutes behind Balter (Joe was much faster, but for some reason ran M35, I think). AP split analysis puts me at a little over 5 minutes in errors, but it was probably a bit worse than that. But, I guess I wasn't the only one. Quite a nice and enjoyable course.

Pine Hill (Long Pond), Red middle distance qualifier. Since M45 had so few competitors, qualifying wasn't going to be a problem, so this was more of a model event and a chance to loosen up. The model event aspect was important since it revealed that the map was damn near unreadable. My brain was also a little whacked out from having gotten too used to the 1:1000 corn maze scale, so things came up later than I was expecting. No really big errors, but a couple of moderate ones. Wound up third in M45 (behind Stefan and Krum) because Balter either used the wrong strategy or feel victim to the illegibility by missing a control completely. Good enough.

Pine Hill (Long Pond), Red middle distance final, kind of sloppy. Krum caught up 2 minutes on me by #11, and another couple of minutes after that, but Stefan made some bigger mistakes and wound up behind me. Not a particularly good run, but good enough for the silver facecloth.

US Corn Maze Orienteering Classic Champs, Mike's Maze, Sunderland, MA. Pretty awful run, trying to go faster than I was able to read the map. Some of the controls that were not spikes were real stinkers. The 1:1000 scale really gave me trouble, I kept overunning things. The worst of these was when I went to control #5 and punched it, thinking I was at #4, and it was only when things didn't make any sense on the way out that I realized I needed to go back.

US Corn Maze Orienteering Sprint Champs, Mike's Maze, Sunderland, MA. I won! National Champion! A much better run, though apparently through dumb luck more than skill. My position in the start list probably helped, as I was able to use some people I was overtaking as a handrail (very helpful when somebody is coming out of a passage and you can say to yourself, "Oh, it's that way!"). Like the Classic race, I ran without glasses, which was fine (never needed to see very far and it made mapreading easier), and also like the Classic, I really have no hope of being able to draw my route. Should have remembered to bring the GPS. My decision to take the route back through the start triangle in order to get to the finish was probably a good idea, and quite likely made the difference. I don't think I had any outstanding splits, but I guess I managed to avoid making any serious goofs.

Quite sure that I didn't violate any corn barriers in either race -- I sometimes took extra steps to make sure I wasn't going through anything questionable.

US Champs Day 2, Moreau Lake. An interesting experience. I managed to maintain a good pace the whole way around the course and hold things together navigationally such that I had quite a good run compared to other people and brought home the bronze in M45. A few particular notes:
1) #3 was a longish leg diagonally across the grain, I had learned from looking at splits yesterday that my strategy of going off the line was not a winner, so I pushed pretty hard in a straight line, noting that there were some pretty big features near the end to look for. I did completely lose track of where I was and drifted slightly off line, but I kepy my eye open for a large marsh. My plan had been to go around the right-hand end of it, but it appeared to my right, so I adjusted and ran up the opposite side. This was either a case of pushing just hard enough for the circumstances, realizing that I had a backup in case I didn't quite execute my plan as intended, or a case of dumb luck.
2) #4 saw me pushing hard enough that I got to what I thought was the center of the circle and was fuzzy enough that I had to stop to read the control description and find out that I was looking for a boulder, rather than a reentrant as I had been thinking. So I scanned the terrain that I could see looking for boulders that I thought might be mapped. Of course I was standing next to something that I originally thought might be a cliff, but it was actually a boulder -- the boulder. If I had taken one more step before looking at the clues, I probably would have seen the flag. Probably didn't lose more than 10 seconds.
3) My #9 was the same as PG's #8. It was the one control that I looked at and said to myself "this could be dangerous, be very careful". So when I hit the trail on top of the ridge, I took it north all the way to the bend, since it was very distinct, and I wanted to get as close as I could on a dead-solid attack. From there it was just two steps: big cliff, knoll, and I got it with no trouble.
4) My one error was on #11, which was the first control down in the lower flatland. I got most of the way there, and then just stopped, baffled, likely due to my having pushed hard on the descent and run my brain out of oxygen. I sort of spun around a little and wandered up in the wrong direction briefly before the fog lifted and I went the right way. Still only a minute slower than the best time.
5) Overall I did much better than at the Highlander, probably in large part because I was just past the worst part of a cold two weeks ago and my aerobic capacity was presumably down. Still, I came into this weekend feeling out of shape and navigationally rusty, and was surprised at how well I did. My feeling on Saturday was that the terrain, while pleasant, was actually quite easy, much like the comments that PG and Heather had about the weird lumpy prairie map in Alberta that was used for (I think) the APOC individual. Looking at Winsplits, I didn't have many splits that were really very good (only one split as good as 5th on Sunday, though I was 5th on RedX for that day). So I guess what was probably happening is that I was doing tolerably well, but doing it consistently and not making any significant mistakes. Though it seemed simple to me, I guess others found it challenging. There are some people further down the list who show up on Winsplits as being error-free, but they were moving quite a bit slower.

US Champs Day 1, Moreau Lake State Park. Pretty good run, one definite miss when I got sloppy at the end of a longish leg (#9), one small error on #14 (didn't lose much), and apparently a not-very good route on the one real route choice leg (32) -- seemed like a pretty good to shoot north and run along the top of the escarpment, but it was several minutes slower than the other folks. Four minutes out of 3rd place among the US competitors on M45 (I think), and only 16 seconds behind Spike's clean run. Not too shabby, I was expecting to be in the middle of the pack, and instead I'm ahead of several people who I expected would trounce me.

Mystery Blazes loop, midday. Brought the GPS so I could figure out for real how long this run is, but it seems to have recorded absolutely nothing. No idea why.

Mystery Blazes loop, cool early evening. AOWN: on the Lane trail, a big bird swooped down in front of me, then perched in a tree, where I could see that it was an owl. I don't often see owls. I don't know what kind this was, but it was quite big — big enough to handle a rabbit, although it didn't seem to have one.

Carrying gear out to launch at Ascutney, two-trip (plus I went partway back to help ARt with his glider, not counted in the time). AOWN: a grouse, with its neck feathers all foofed up, crossed the road when we were driving back up at the end of the day to fetch my car. Never seen one of them before that I can recall.

Wapack Trail from Windblown up to the top of Barrett Mountain and back, with Nancy. Very nice day, but the foliage hasn't worked this far south yet.

Mystery Blazes loop. A variation where I followed the blazed trail along the Mulpus quite a bit further than usual, and jumped the brook at a gravel bar. Through serendipity, that turned out to be exactly at the end of the Mystery Blazes on the other side. This meant that I was able to do this loop on 100% trails, although about half of it is on trails that are so incredibly faint that not even Tonto would notice if crossing them, and even knowing where they go, it takes considerable concentration to follow them. In other words, it might as well be off-trail terrain running.

Warm evening, very nice to be out. I had been coughing quite a bit during the day, and was worried that I'd be coughing while running, but it wasn't bad at all. Once I stopped, though, I had such a coughing fit that I had to sit down on the stone wall for a few minutes. Distance is a pretty wild guess.

Hudson Highlander XV. The remnants of the cold didn't hurt me quite as much as I feared they might, though I'm sure my aerobic capacity was diminished, and I probably hadn't eaten as much as I might have if I were healthy. There were a few times (on the first leg, and then late in the course) where my brain was really pretty foggy, the worst of these being on #29, where I got probably to the edge of the circle before spacing out, and losing enough time that four people got past me. No blisters, though, and it looks like all of my toenails are fine, which is a welcome change from prior years.