Training Log Archive: jennycas

5 x short sprintervals around the uni thanks to Bridget. Might have to give up night sprints because I simply can't read the control circle detail even with a headlamp.

Warmup to the uni, runthroughs which bothered my harmstring, then extended warmdown before 2018 Aust Champs meeting.

Around the suburbs. South Rd is marginally less boring by night. In other news, we finally bought a new mattress - damn, they are expensive! - and it's twice as thick as my 20-year old one so I may have to create a new loggable activity: climbing, just to get up into the (already higher than average) bed. I'm not good with heights though, so what if I fall out in the night...?

C • Falling out?? 15

Really didn't feel like orienteering this morning - it was cold and wet, I had a splitting headache and stuffed-up head, and I knew the course would be exactly the same as last year. But...I had Wallaringa t-shirts to hand out, and the fresh air when I did run cleared my head a bit, and I just sneaked in under 40, although I was a bit disappointed to be only 2 minutes faster than 13 months ago. Exciting that there was actually water in the creeks, too.

Sore throat last night explained why I have been feeling so flat the past couple of days, and I really didn't want to get out of bed this morning, but once I'd made it to Narrinyeri and spent an hour and a half putting out tapes for training (had recycled some short courses from Mar 2010, but didn't realise there were over 30 controls, and needed to make sure that they were all numbered correctly & matched the descriptions!) I felt up to tackling the 'green' course (without tapes) on the south side of the road which Robin had set for B&S. Map updates were last done before the 2009 NOL Hagaby which Simon set, which was not long after a fire had been through the area, and so many of the 'white' bits are more like fight now and it's a game of hide-and-seek with the rock features. Which is not to say it wasn't fun, on a beautifully sunny autumn day with the smell of honey in the air, and some people even stayed around for a picnic afterwards!

C • B&S 5

Last one until September. How did it get to be the end of May already?

So, I wasn't that excited about the thought of a night score event around the streets of Athelstone, but Clive & Marion had made their special World Orienteering Day activity sound so enticing that I actually managed to make it across town by 6pm, along with 40+ other people.

There were 30 controls just within the Thorndon Park picnic area, and each represented a country (as did the competitors although we didn't have to match up with anything else) and this was great fun, also hilarious, as all the headlamps went every which way from the mass start. I knew it was going to be possible to get all the controls within the 45 min limit (this only took Simon 16 min) and although I therefore tried to find an efficient way of doing so, I kind of failed at that, taking a suboptimal route between/around the artificial lakes. But I still managed to come 4th because not everyone managed to go to all the controls they thought they'd been to...

A truly multicontinental affair, which could only have been improved by the presence of a mutant bunny: http://worldorienteeringday.com/index.php/rabbit-t...

It's been a while since we've done these, and I'm starting further up the hill (relative to Simon at the bottom) than I used to, but if we do them often enough then maybe I can rectify some of the deficit. 5 was plenty for tonight though.

Warmup/down plus all the downhills, noting that Adelaide Oval is lit up in red/white/blue in solidarity with Manchester Arena.

Short suburban stagger to make sure I had room for dinner at Stamps: http://www.stampsrestaurant.com.au/

C • By the way .... 8

This course had quite a lot of track running (which is a good thing at Eden Hills) and was very scenic along Magpie Gully. My legs were pretty tired from last night to start with & more so by the end. Perfect day for it though and so I stood around chatting afterwards for far longer than I had actually spent running.

Glorious afternoon for a lovely ride along the valley, noticing how the autumn leaves have suddenly started dropping in the past week.

Took a while to make friends with new goggles.

On the way to night-O, stopped to do a course from training a few years ago which had mainly contours and bearings and only a small window of actual map around the control site. As darkness fell, my ability to end up within that window became significantly worse...

Sarah had set this course as part of the TJ camp. It had lots of short legs with direction changes and I was having a lot of trouble with my own directions until I tightened my headlamp which kept slipping sideways. Fun though, and thank goodness for the reflectors :)

New Wallaringa T-shirts are here!

Just a short one because legs & brain are tired tonight. Never seem to run as fast in the dark as I think I'm doing...

Fun sprint course at Glenelg with all the legs turned around different ways (thanks to Stefano) so you had to keep re-orienting the map. Started to run out of pace on my own legs about halfway around but Toby and Remi kept me honest in terms of running hard and I kept them honest in terms of actually touching the feature.

North Adelaide loop with juniors and parents at 30 sec on, 1 min off. We probably could have done more than 15 intervals, but that seemed like a good number before starting. Anyway, my hamstring's still a bit tight, hopefully just post-massage. Did notice that I don't drop my arms at all - too much map-holding lately?

After AOTKM (which will hoffentlich have loosened up neck & shoulders) it was still a pleasant evening, although pitch black already, so I went into Sheps (very little evidence of today's schools' champs because the ground is so dry) and up the big hill, down through Eden Hills. Enjoyable run but I probably need to do some longer stuff ASAP since I've entered elites for Wagga.

Suburban plod after a day out with parents: Mother's Day lunch at the pub in Mt Compass and visiting an open garden/organic farm and cheese factory nearby. Didn't have much energy left by the time I got home but my legs have finally stopped twitching (low magnesium?) after the rogaine. Definitely need to stop eating chips (of all species) because that's all I seem to have consumed in the past week.

Beautifully sunny May afternoon so I decided to ride to the event at O'Halloran Hill (uphill to Seaview Downs Primary) then to my parents' at Somerton Pk (glorious views out over the ocean from Brighton) and home again (getting cold & bored by now because my bike goes so slowly).

Tight knees from bike and sore spot in foot post-rogaine made this a bit of a plod, but at least the views out over the city and coast from the top of the hill were good. Got buzzed by a drone while coming down a ridgeline track!

Also did Bridget's 'junior' punching exercise as warmup :)

C • Huh? 2

Pool thermometer read 4 degrees this morning which is colder than last weekend's rogaine was (except maybe just after sunrise). Kicking a bit gumbily because of loose skin on blistered toes; it's surprising how quickly skin does regenerate though.

C • Regenerate 5

Redwoods run with the Arro-Gang, listening to Lauren's plans for world mountain running champs (this was a rare flat run for her) and how Greg's whole family does the Christies Beach parkrun.

Drained the Blister Formerly Known As Big Toenail. A bit gruesome, but I anticipate it will improve from now on. And at least it seems as though I'm only going to lose one post-rogaine toenail.

Stupid AP dropped me out just when I had written a long essay about the rogaine...does anyone else have a problem with their computers not remaining logged into AP recently?

Anyway, I feel way less vague today post-rogaine than I did last Monday after coming back from NZ when I was sick. And much happier after the rogaine than after WMOC. Rogaining is just so much more rewarding and enjoyable than orienteering. Also more painful, but it feels good when it stops hurting! Maybe because the race is longer, the endorphins take longer to wear off?

HH->41->80->50->83->45->99->70->63->92->52->84->95->W2
5 hrs, 12 controls, 16km(ish)
W2-> 46->74-> 100->65->71->102->60->81->61->53->ANC
6hrs, 10 controls, 15km(ish)
ANC->75->77->89->103->49-> 94->56->98->W1
8hrs, 9 controls, 14km?
W1->85-> 101->73->82->51->44->40->90->31-HH with 7 min to spare
5 hrs, 9 controls, 15km?

21st place which is the same as at Capertee with Zara.

C • Logged on 5

C • A Shame 6

C • You just need to get a bit older 4

2 cups of tea and 2 cheese toasties at the amazing ANC (you should have seen the volunteers' especially-made orange-and-white rogaining aprons) weren't enough to ward off my usual 11pm slump; in fact they may have contributed to it because my body was more interested in digesting than in rogaining! But thankfully the feeling of overwhelming fatigue passed. We'd decided not to get any controls in the far NE or SE and instead to go a fair way east for some high-pointers, and were making good time with these, so much so that I was starting to think we'd get to the next water drop not much after 5am. Pride goes before a fall, of course, and we came unstuck on a leg which I'd previously identified as being the hardest on the whole course (at night, anyway).

Following up a flat creek valley to the south and unsure precisely how many junctions we'd passed, we twice stopped less than 200m from the control and did a big loop around to the next creek north, because some of the watercourses marked on the map ceased to exist on the ground in a flat marshy area and we couldn't work out how/where to find them again. We got confused by a clear area too - generally the vegetation was mapped really well but because there wasn't a distinct creek channel running through the middle of this one like there should have been, thought we were on the next clearing further south. If only we'd remembered the mantra of "distance and direction is key" but sometimes it's a bit hard to focus at 4 in the morning.

Yeah, so having lost an hour on that control (56) we thought we'd play it safe on the next one (98) by a direct bearing across 2 obvious saddles and the control being on the 3rd saddle in this line. Which should have worked apart from the minor detail of crossing the final creek and climbing the final spur at 90 degrees to the direction which we should have gone...was pretty pleased with my persistence in finally figuring out what we'd done; even if it did take me half an hour to catch on, at least we didn't have to wait for the sun to come up in order to do so.

So it was 7am by the time we reached the next water and what we had to do fairly directly back to the HH in the next 5 hours was about 80% of what we'd done in the initial 5 hours, but my toes were really hurting and Alex was having to wait for me at controls and hilltops. The one time I did get ahead of her was when we got separated in a green creek valley and she thought I was still behind, when in fact I'd powered on to the control and then heard her calling me from about 400m away - oops. But that was the only miscommunication we had all rogaine, and were in agreement that there was definitely no time for controls in the far SW if we wanted to be able to do the 150m ascent and descent to/from 90 on the top of the Black Ridge just east of the HH. This was a hard control to be finishing on, but at Capertee ARC 2015 all the controls were like that...

Anyway, despite the time lost in the night, our efforts were good enough for 3rd women's (2nd women's vets) and surprisingly less than 200 points behind Tamsin & Thor; we were moving slightly faster than them in the day time but obviously they had a better night. Only about 2/3 of the winning score of the incredible Julie & David, of course, and I don't think that even in peak fitness I could match the winning women's team but then Jess & Gill are the sort of people who run Six Foot track in not much over 4 hours! And the best bit about the presentations was that the organisers had hand-made rogaining aprons for the winners, and bags for second place, so now I have a little orange & white bag to keep my rogaining gear (that which doesn't routinely live in my O kit) in :)

Aust Champs rogaine near Cooma with Alex Tyson. We hadn't rogained together for 15 years and obviously our fitness is a long way from when we came 3rd women's in the 2000 WRC in NZ, but we were well matched and it was easy to fall back into the old partnership. I'd been looking forward to this event because the photos on the website made it look like nice open forest, not too steep and with hopefully no nasty surprises - and so it proved. There were some subtle contours out there and a complex network of ridgelines and creeks, some with steep erosion gullies often skirted by strips of dense bushiness; much like the area used for day 2/3 of Easter 2016.

The HH was in the far west of the map, with an All Night Café pretty much in the middle, and 2 other water drops a few km north and southeast of there. We planned a loop of approx. 60km, trying to maximize the time/distance between water drops: around the NW perimeter to W2 in the afternoon, inner-northern loop to ANC in the evening, NE loop to W1 in the wee sma's then finishing off across the south in the morning with plenty of options for adding or subtracting controls near the end as time permitted. Speaking of time, I was surprised at how early we'd finished making our plan, but suddenly Alex told me it was 5 minutes to the briefing, and I still had to tape my ankles! Turned out that my watch had reset itself to SA time - it did that in NZ too :(

For the first 3 hours I felt great, strolling across the hills on a glorious autumn afternoon, but then my toenails started to become painful - wearing my oldest runners with holes in the sides should have meant that toes had lots of space but in fact the looseness of shoes meant that my socks bunched up around heels, compressing toes uncomfortably. Once I'd fed them some painkillers though, didn't notice hamstring at all.

Reached the water drop about 5pm and we got torches out in anticipation of the fast-falling darkness. Picked off controls pretty well in the night, although annoyingly made a couple of control-circle errors where my instinctive guess as to location was correct, but we checked the 'alternate facts' location first. Reached ANC before 11pm and so allowed ourselves half an hour there, both rearranging shoes & socks and I finally put on a 2nd layer - despite a frosty forecast, it turned out to be only a one-thermal night.

A bit worried about lack of rogaine-fitness, not having done any proper training, but at least I'm feeling more lively than the day before last year's WRC.

C • Rogaine fitness 2

Trundled over to Mitcham & back, trying not to aggravate hamstring, which didn't like pushing off at lights (or standing on one leg to put my stockings on before work). Thumbs & ears felt that this morning was good rogaine-acclimatisation.

Up Hillrise admiring the sunset, Tunnel X-over before it got dark, back through the suburbs. Legs still very tight and heavy despite AOTKM on Mon. WMOC-issue cold has mostly abated but the overwhelming fatigue is hanging around longer than I'd like.
What does it mean if a black rabbit crosses your path?

C • Black rabbit 3

To the weir with the group, then I only managed 2 stair reps because of how bad my hip/hamstring is since tweaking it when I tripped & fell towards the end of Saturday's race, then I finished off via the footbridge behind the zoo, thinking about rogaining in the frosty moonlight. Trying to remember when I last did a rogaine with negative overnight temperatures - maybe SA Champs @Nackara in 2009?

Have realised that another reason why I was disappointed with the Long Final is that it wasn't technically as difficult as I had expected. Don't get me wrong; there were plenty of opportunities to come unstuck (which is why I red-lined everything, not daring to take a faster track because I might get misplaced when I left it) but I had been hoping for more of the low-visibility stuff like we'd had on the Oceania Long, which I really enjoyed. Other maps/races which I've really enjoyed include last year's Aust Long Champs at Amiens, Kooyoora at any time except when it's hot, and the Gothenburg terrain from WMOC 2015; basically, terrain where nobody else can run fast and they are all brought back to my level!

C • technical difficulty 2

Swimming over the hotspots upwelling in my lane made me think how this was a cheaper 'thermal pool' to be in than most of the commercial ones in NZ. Hip flexor not happy today, partly due to 5 hrs on a plane yesterday. But I am grateful that AirNZ does have some direct flights to Adelaide. Also I am completely exhausted and wondering why I signed up for a 24-hour rogaine this weekend.

C • Wondering why? 4