Training Log Archive: Wyatt

Loop around the Northern parts of suburban Dijon, France on a Sunday evening in August. Recently evacuated ghost town feel - e.g. ran through a mall parking lot with spaces for 3000 cars - saw two cars.

WOC Spectator Event Day 6

4x4-5 minute errors. Not a good note to end on navigationally, but that's life. Beautiful forest at least for this training run, and some good splits at the end.

And AJ accidentally took an M70 map instead of M10, so got stuck with a Brown course in this ridiculously hard terrain. Splits of course were a list of mispunches. A long list. The codes of which matched the descriptions on his M70 course. OMG. AJ finished an advanced course in WOC terrain - by accident. I don't think we could've convinced him to even try this, yet, by accident, he not only tried it, but finished it. Wow!

WOC spectator event, day 5, M35.

Another very challenging day of orienteering. Items on the map are on the ground, but many items on the ground are not on the map, due to terrain detail. The most obvious consequence of this is that relocation is really ambiguous. A perhaps less obvious consequence of this, is that items on the map take up more room on the map, than they do on the ground. E.g. a small clearing and reentrant on the map, that, at scale is ~15m in diameter, may, on the ground, but 3m in diameter. Or a brown pit may be 3x3m - in an area with several other slightly smaller pits, and there's only room on the map to fit one brown V, so they try to drop it on the largest pit, leaving all the other similar pits unmapped.
When looking for such bag-in-the-woods controls, you need to have confidence you are in the right place, which means never losing contact, or at least regaining in solidly, every 50m to 100m max. I was in fuzzy contact - GPS says correct, but I wasn't sure due to a failure to check compass for ~100+m - for about 250m of an off trail route. As a result, I pulled up just short on my bearing and then started map reading relocation - trying to read a vague hilltop, rather than the more solid large depressions and somehow I let that spiral, just going further and further the wrong way. Similar to my largest blowout 2 days ago, I didn't really stop and search the right area, but rather kept going way, way beyond the control area, via map reading. I think I need to relocate more strongly on a compass bearing too, esp. in this terrain. And, given some pull-up-short's recently on a bearing, holding on the bearing and looking for features around/beyond the control on the same line might be good too.

Largest error was 10.5 minutes. All the rest was ~3 minutes, so I one control from a pretty-good run.

Lacho had a similar course, and was 7.3 min/km. I was only 10-20% back from him on my nice & clean legs, but was 13min/km due to the blowout, and even only 10min/km w/o, apparently due to severe wimpiness/hesitation (see intensity, HR was really lowish a lot of the time.) 2000 controls, and a more consistent prep-to-race might do me good too.

Uphill warmup, for a mostly flat/downhill race.

8/17 was a disaster - 20-25 min. lost. And I considered this the final nail in the coffin of the already remote-seeming possibility that I would be navigating superbly in France, which could've made it sensible for me to run the WOC Relay for the US. While it is individually competitively-disappointing to not be cleaner in this terrain or faster in general, I'm also competitive from a USA-team perspective, and in the vein, I see Jordan & Sergei navigating comparably, and physically able to do much better in the relay-important aspect of sticking to the faster teams when they are around. With Ross, Jordan & Sergei, I think we've got a least a possibility of a fairly competitive finish, perhaps as close as 10-20% overall vs. the winning team - maybe even closer if the navigation knocks the leaders back, as happens often here in France.

8/18's M35 race was good, and 1 control from great. 5+ minutes lost on one bag, then 60s hes. nav., then 20s, then a few 10sec/5sec's led to 5th place finish. Maybe I will figure out this terrain, right before I leave :)

Good internet only when I visit Angelica's hotel is hampering the training log, likely for others on the team as well. At the Team hotel, internet only works a few minutes each hour, apparently even for the hotel manager/owner - one of the few disappointments of an otherwise nice hotel.

O-Fest Day 4 M35 race was good, and 1 control from great. 5+ minutes lost on one bag, then 60s hes. nav., then 20s, then a few 10sec/5sec's led to 5th place finish. Maybe I will figure out this terrain, right before I leave :)

Paused 10 sec's to look at the beautiful view of Chamberry from the cross on the cliff - allowing Magnus to beat me - my only chance. Ah, tradeoffs...

Jog down to the start.

Spectator Event # 3 was a disaster - 20-25 min. lost. I considered this the final nail in the coffin of the already remote-seeming possibility that I would be navigating superbly in France, which could've made it sensible for me to run the WOC Relay for the US. While it is individually competitively-disappointing to not be cleaner in this terrain or faster in general, I'm also competitive from a USA-team perspective, and in that vein, I see Jordan & Sergei navigating comparably, and physically able to do much better in the relay-important aspect of sticking to the faster teams when they are around. With Ross, Jordan & Sergei, I think we've got a least a possibility of a fairly competitive finish, perhaps as close as 10-20% overall vs. the winning team - maybe even closer if the navigation knocks the leaders back, as happens often here in France.

Looks like I won a split, perhaps my only one all week. Perhaps I should dig up the map. [added later] Dug up the map and found the key to winning this split was that I'd done 2/3 of 9-10 in reverse, trying to find 9, and I had just seen Clem coming out of 9, and had a vague hope (not realized) of catching back up to him. The quick rough compass angle to the yellow line, then realizing the bright-yellow-line led right into the control (with shape of line in mind) is the repeatable portion of this good habit.

On the bad things (adds to 21:15, removal of which would've been good enough for a win of M35 - I was running well today physically, after the WOC Sprint = Wyatt rest day.)
1) :15 - too vague attack across hilltop, surpised to see control behind me to my left, but reasonably close
2) 4:00 - went right through saddle, but apparently got off bearing, found wrong clearings, and bounced around in several of them before popping back out from way too far east in obviously the right clearing, with a bag on a knoll. Not sure how I didn't see it before.
3) OMG 8:30 - bailed poorly to the trail, should've gone more SE to the small trail maybe? Attacked from wrong bend in trail, following wrong line of weaker depression-clearings. Ended up in medium green crisscrossing deadfall over stony ground (= 1-2m+ deep 0.1-1m wide cracks in moss covered limestone) before bailing out to surprisinginly find 4...
8) 5:00 - Rough compass to try to pick up clearings, eventually bailing to clearing at west, back to trail at south and reattack. Still not sure if I missed it north or south of the bad. Maybe north, but surprised I didn't see it as it was a reasonably large depression, with heavy traffic...
9) 3:30 - bail was awfully slow (stuck, go back), and then initial attack was okay, but lack of compass discipline let me drift right, and pick up a different set of depressions. Relocated on a control in a depression near 10.
Official distance 3.5k - my distance guessed - left GPS at home (it's too bad - would've been nice to figure out what happened in places.)

To start and some running from car to finish area

WOC Sprint and a relative-rest day for me. Cheering while walking around town in the Quali was pretty cool. Sad that none of the guys got into the final, but good to see Ali & Sam in! And both, esp. Ali, had good speed in the final, just with unfortunate errors. Ali 1 control away from a ~top 10 finish was pretty amazing. Very strong physically, and very hard-working in her technical orienteering.

Time logged is jogging around spectating mostly in the Quali & some in the Final.

Spectator Event 2 - some easier legs, some major hills. 11th in M35. Haven't done splits analysis yet, but estimate (which matched yesterday) was 5 minutes - though estimate was very quick, and is correspondingly coarse. Course was shorter, and somewhat fewer controls, but this stills seems comparable to yesterday's accuracy, perhaps a bit better?

Physically still not pushing super hard due to unclear place on/off the WOC Relay team coming up on the 20th, and perhaps residual tiredness due to WOC Quali effort level.

Just checked and was 15 minutes behind Magnus, and 18 behind course leader, so maybe underestimated by slopiness? Or my sloth in climbing some of the hills, or dealing with the mud?

Got much better parking by waving my WOC badge today, something it wasn't clear on the allowance of yesterday.

Warmup only. I've been skipping cooldowns all week. Bad?