Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Started streamering a course at the sagey Pitcher Hill for the upcoming Labor Day training weekend, and then decided it would be good to go back to my truck to wait out a vicious hailstorm, and then afterwards resumed the streamering. Made it back to the truck with a good 19 seconds to spare before the heavens totally opened fire.

Back home, and some takeaways from Scotland include:

1) If you're used to wide open running with great visibility and firm underfooting (as in the Mountain West), then certain aspects of Scottish orienteering provide some useful counter-balancing (read: challenge!).

2) Scotland is very green and lush because...

3) It rains an awful lot in Scotland. Which leads to supernatural amounts of...

4) Bracken. Actually that probably needs additional emphasis, so: bracken. If you have an early start in a bracken forest against a big start field, you might as well accept that your lot for the day is to become a bracken brasher, and that maybe some other time it will all even out. Because you're not going to be winning that day--ha!

5) Except for 2 bad stretches on Days 1 and 4, my orienteering was mostly not so bad, and my results were much better than anything I might have guessed at.

6) Even if the mountains in Scotland aren't very high (the highest are much lower than my home in Laramie), going up into the highest peaks still deserves a certain amount of respect for the possibility of bad weather conditions. Which I experienced first hand during a run in the Cairngorms which turned out to be slightly more epic than either planned or hoped for.

7) The Isle of Skye is worthy of a trip in and of itself.

8) It was so nice that my calf healed up just in time to run 100% in Scotland, and even if it was too bad that I couldn't do the training I had planned for July leading up to the trip, it still feels like luck was in my favor.

9) Great company and friends made it so much fun.