Training Log Archive: cedarcreek

I DNFed the Long course. It was about as long a course as I could hope to do in 3 hours, and the heat and my lack of fitness just did me in. On my 4, I screwed up somehow and thought I was perfectly placed until I crested the last depression and---no depression, no flag. I spent a lot of time relocating, and I would have taken longer if I didn't stumble on the trail north of the start tent. My only guess is that I just didn't see the flag the first time by.

I nailed my first long leg (5?), although a trail seemed misplaced or moved.

On the way to 8, I think, I didn't see the wide left trail route, and instead I just pieced together this longish leg with complicated baby steps. I got dizzy twice and sat down in the shade to cool off. I misread a long deep depression/reentrant as a long ridgeline, then convinced myself that I was on that ridgeline until it widened and I saw I read the feature wrong. It really screwed me up because I had lost what little attackpoints I had. I used a clearing and then another clearing to "relocate" (in quotes to show how shaky it was). I thought I needed to go one more hill north, but I decided to turn left and see if I was in the right feature---and I was.

After that, the map just seemed to completely misrepresent the vegetation. I was going through 2nd or 3rd green, and the map said it was white or first green. I was stumbling, dehydrated, and not having much fun. I missed 9 the first time by, got it, then punched 10 and the finish. If I tried to finish, I would have OT'd. I also had at least 10 hours of driving still that day. I drank a lot, talked a little, then figured Mike was at the car already, so I hiked out.

We made it to Grand Forks, ND by 3am or so, then got up and left after 3.5 or so hours of sleep. I got home 1:30 or so Tuesday morning after a day of over 1000 miles driving.

I really liked the Red (Course 9) long legs. The Blue (Course 10) long legs looked pretty boring. No offense, but it just seemed like the trail was the best way, and that the swamp was a big risk for not much benefit. The elephant tracks were pretty obvious for some of my course. I'd recommend future courses here make sure those tracks cross courses regularly to attempt to make navigation more fair for early and late starters.

I think this is the first time I used 5 for the map reading intensity. Walking around the warm-up map was at first a little scary, but then it seemed to make sense to me. Coming up here Friday morning would have been time well spent, but I'm still glad I didn't.

Probably the most technically difficult course I've ever run. And run is a poor word to use. I walked about 90% of it. After the sprint effort, I woke up sore all over. Amazingly, my time was much closer to the faster people than on any course I've ever run. Someone (I'm withholding the name) said his time would have been better if he walked the whole way. There were some pretty monumental errors. As it was, I had at least 10 minutes of errors and hesitations.

I really want to go back to this terrain for a non-summer course. With the vegetation, it was a lot like night-orienteering---I was relying on the tiniest hints of terrain near the limits of my vision.

I remember 4 or 5 times standing in the circle looking at the map, trying to make sense of what I'd seen getting there, and then deciding, say, to turn right...and there it was. If it didn't happen so many times, I would say I got lucky. I still gotta admit that I was at least partly serially lucky---I don't think I can claim great skill for this course. I did have a decent performance navigating. My fitness is terrible. Worse than last year.

I had two major booms. Control 1 (87) for 2-3 minutes, and 12 (42) for perhaps 4 minutes. I heard a comment that the start triangle was misplaced in the terrain. I don't know if it was. It would explain a lot if it were a little north of the map location.

This was one amazing middle course. I wonder if the lack of runnability surprised the organizers. I hope that is the explanation.

More time scouting at the University of Saskatchewan. Found more tapes and visited most of the ones Mike had found.

Mike and I decided that it was unlikely our knowledge would affect the results. It wasn't really obvious how the courses were laid out---the model clue sheets were mostly in numerical order, and the actual sprint turned out to jump around a lot, possibly as a defense against people finding the tapes. We agreed to not show anyone our marked-up campus maps, although I did end up blabbing about it to 3 people.

Canadian Orienteering Championships Sprint at Univ. of Sasketchewan.

A really nice, top-quality sprint. I think of 16 controls, I knew about 9 tapes beforehand. It didn't really diminish the experience (or help my time---I had expected controls in about 3 other spots where I didn't see the tape, and just walking around helped much more).

If I had one complaint, it would be that the course needed a few more controls. It didn't have any control picking areas with 3 or 4 short legs in a row. That's where I get the "sprint feeling" in most sprints. This course never really gave me that frantic feeling, except on 10-11 (62-67).

I did love that almost every leg required either a route choice or non-trivial map reading. (Even on 10-11, I left 10 90-deg off, so that was pretty frantic.)

Another thing that surprised me was that the organizers had people with signs to stop traffic for us. Wow. At 4-7pm on a Friday afternoon in the summer---on a university campus---I would have expected them to just let us deal with traffic. It was a nice touch, and I'm sure it made it a lot safer for us, and fairer for the people in contention for the championships.

Walking around the University of Sasketchewan scouting for the Sprint. We had just finished a 28-hour drive (over two days), and Mike and I really needed to stretch our legs.

I had a nice campus map (with numerous errors and no sidewalks or vegetation), and my plan was to spend a lot of time near the complicated central part of campus since I figured the most obvious courses would pass through that area several times, and knowing that area would pay the biggest dividends. I walked all the way around as many buildings as I could.

After about 45 minutes or an hour, Mike and I met up, and he asked if I had heard the voice mail he left for me. I had not.

He told me about 5 minutes after we split up at the car, he had found a short orange surveying tape that looked *an awful lot like a vetting tape*. He had gone on to find more. We split back up, and found a few more.

Our plan was to spend Friday morning doing the 2-hour round trip to the model area, but because of the tapes (and because spending 2 more hours in a car seemed unpleasant), we decided to spend Friday morning looking for tapes around campus.

A high-gnarliness factor sprint set by hkleaf. I really can't complain about the times---the courses look good on paper. This was a week after I got rear-ended, and I was still feeling it.

I think I entered these backwards. This one was first.

The second one took a lot out of me. That plus running the SportIdent and being outside all day (even on a day as perfect as this one), meant I was beat when I got home.

Event: Canadian Championships 2007 Saskatchewan
 

First run in a long time. One-hill route with a loop of the rec center. Felt slow and out-of-shape for the first 3km or so. Then, the song M&Ms by Blink 182 popped up (in shuffle mode), and I just wanted to *run fast now*. So I took off, and discovered that the first 20 seconds or so is manic, and then it slows down and leaves you hanging. I couldn't keep up the pace, so I finished the run with 3 random-length intervals where I'd run really fast, then walk, hit the back button, and then go all out for as long as I could. "All out" is probably hyperbole---It was maybe 6min/mile, maybe a little faster. I'm paying for it with the feeling of ripped muscle fibers, but I felt that before I hit the cool song.

I've had a pretty good weekend considering. Considering I got rear-ended on the interstate on Friday, and my used Jetta, which I've had about 2 months, is most likely totalled. It had to be towed away because it wasn't driveable. I got hit from behind, and the impact pushed me into the car in front of me (there was a backup due to an earlier wreck), so my car got it from both ends. Of three cars and four occupants, there were no apparent injuries, although I've been really sore for two days.



I'm actually looking for another Jetta (assuming this one gets totalled). I felt this one took really good care of me in the accident. (If you click through that photo, there are more photos.)

I've seen at least 8 movies since my last entry, but I'll only mention one right now:

Sicko (1): I was one of the people who vowed to never pay to see Fahrenheit 911. It really pained me to do that because I'm such a big Michael Moore fan. I loved loved loved "Roger and Me". I loved "Bowling for Columbine", except for his blindsiding of Charlton Heston. That one is a little tough to explain, because I think a lot of points he tried to make in BFC are just completely vacuous. An example is the way he tries to draw a moral connection between the bombing of Bosnia (?) by the US and the act of the two killers at Columbine.

Anyway, back to Sicko. I loved it. I agree with more than I disagree with. But in the days since I saw it, I just kept thinking about all the arguments we heard at the begining of the Clinton presidency. I'm not sure Sicko addresses any of the serious issues that need to be answered to make big changes to US Healthcare possible. Michael Moore admitted as much. He said this is his movie, and he put in it what he wants to put on the screen. I respect that. He leaves a lot out, and tries to slip in some apples-to-oranges comparisons.

My personal view of politics and elections in the US is that it acts like a pendulum. It swings back and forth, and specifically never approaches a median point. This means it rarely produces true compromises, or anything like an optimum compromise. It tends to lock in a lean to the left or right, and tends to changes in big swings rather than little tweaks.

This movie really impacted my thinking. I've started to research other countries' systems, and proposals to improve ours. Right after I saw Sicko, I heard and read mostly attacks against Sicko. But as I've been searching out more, I've been finding a lot of very good discussions about health care, including a lot of the details that Moore left out.

Going back to my pendulum analogy, unless the Republicans pull out a miracle in 2008, the pendulum is going to swing to the far left, and there is going to be not only a mandate to change health care, but the votes to get it done. I think we as Americans should be learning what we can and paying attention for when the health care debates start again.

I agree with Moore that it reflects badly on America that we essentially deny poor people even basic health care. We are better than that. I'll go one up on Sicko and say that I think our lack of a social net is hurting our economy.