Training Log Archive: jennycas

Event: Melbourne Sprint Weekend
 

Race with which I was reasonably happy even though I didn't identify all the blocked routes on the way to the first control and so went right when left would have been better. Incidentally, Monash is completely unrecognisable from when I last ran here over 10 years ago. Think I took the longer way around 8-9 too. But otherwise this felt pretty smooth and I enjoyed it a lot because I like uni campuses (campii?) and it was still a coolish morning despite the forecast 35 degrees. Also I was well fueled because my avocado toast for breakfast had been accompanied by bonus jalapeno chillies.

...which it reached, @5pm, and even though I figured I'd had plenty of acclimatisation in an Adelaide summer, my brain was maybe still a bit cooked (and also my hip hadn't liked spending the intervening time in an OA Board meeting) and this was a very intricate school campus where somehow I failed to see that the outside route 4-5 had no way back in to the kindergarten so then had to run all the way around the fence/wall to get in, losing about a minute. By the time we crossed into the other school, legs were cooked too, so this was a fairly awful time for a WRE of which I'd had some slight optimism about doing okay. Ended up getting some extra weight training in when collecting controls - it turns out that I can not carry 4 sawhorses at once!

Took anti-inflammatories last night in order to make this morning's foam roller torture bearable.

Desultory jog with Zara, & Callum of course, so that I could properly stretch my legs afterwards - hip flexor & adductor seized up after going from training to sitting in a meeting last night, and I could hardly walk this morning - but somehow the stretching aggravated my groin even more and I could hardly walk around the house when I got home either :( Sunset shining goldenly through the eucalypts and xanthorrhoeas was beautiful though. (Also, after what I've been finding out firsthand over the past few weeks about the internal politics within SARA, I think maybe being part of 5 different orienteering committees at once isn't actually so bad...)

C • 5 committees 1

Surprisingly warm morning for March.

OMG, it took me an hour to get from work to the SE corner of the city (lately the traffic bottlenecks engendered by Flinders Uni students and FMC staff all leaving simultaneously mean that it takes 20 min just from getting in the car to reaching Sturt Rd 1km away - there are even queues within the multistorey carpark - but also it turns out that Adelaide comes to a standstill when 65 000 people go to an Ed Sheeran concert). So I really needed to pee, and just plodded around, having a lot of trouble getting in and out of the dry creek channels and ending up stuck in a thicket on the other side each time.

Have been fairly stressed lately by all the rogaine-organising, and my usual trick of being able to switch that off and focus on the map didn't work very well tonight, so for this course around the streets and laneways I did (at least) 2 dumb things:
- misunderstood a couple of Manu's control descriptions and convinced myself that he had set an exercise for us where the descriptions were deliberately wrong, so then I ignored them all!
- went down the wrong street, but I made everything fit, so did a massive parallel error and then had to go around the entire block again; extra distance my tired legs didn't need.

Found the M21E courses which I had set for the NOL sprint qualifier in Mar 2013, so went for a jog around - legs were heavy and I rather regretted my route choice down & up through the pine forest valley but I really couldn't face running past the security guard on the bridge again.

Finally bit the bullet and coughed up $3K to fly into Milan and home again from Oslo. Mind you, I know people who spend that much on 'retail therapy'...

Great little course around the Lutheran school near McLaren Vale. Tried to run hard and managed to stay in contact with the map mostly - a couple of lucky saves despite dodgy exit directions, one leg where the line between controls hid a blocked access and so I ran into a dead end. And then there was the infamous 122, which for the men was their first control and for us the 24th. The map really truly made it look like the control would be where an impassable fence met the outside corner of the building, but the building was an open-fronted shed and so the description was of course "undercover area, inside corner". Oxygen debt (finally able to run faster than I can currently think on the run) meant that I went to the outside corner, had a WTF moment, checked my description and bolted around to the inside, losing maybe 25 sec. 2 min behind Liv; ideally I should have been about 40 sec faster across this course without mistakes but I still managed a lot better than many people, particularly on 122. Very impressed by the M16s' times on this course though!

My hip/groin tightened up horribly this afternoon (too much time sitting at computer last night and again this morning because I got up at 6am to write rogaine event info) and I could hardly walk when I got home, but then after spending a few hours sorting through my boxes of maps and travel paraphernalia from 2010/11/12 I had unearthed a 2012 sprint series map of Waite , so thought I'd go run around that while the pizza we'd just made was in the oven. This was good fun and my hip held up ok - started having trouble reading the map towards the end as it was getting dark, also my eyes don't read the detail so well any more even at 1: 4 000. Good thing this morning was @1: 3 000!