Training Log Archive: jtorranc

Event: QOC - Great Falls, MD
 

QOC Great Falls Brown - glad to have a race to go to at all. Fairly good race once I finished screwing up the second control - didn't quite pay enough attention to my rough compass to ensure I'd see my intended collecting features on the way to the control and ended up stopping south of the control looking down into the big reentrant running northwest with the trail in it and thinking, "This isn't right". I also failed to read enough of the detail in the control circle on 4 and ended up checking the code on the white control thirty or so meters away from mine. The long leg to 5 and other running through the open woods/subtle contour detail areas were a blast.

Brown - Splits

Got out the door a little later than intended and decided my usual plan of taking Metro to Vienna and cycling to Great Falls from there was vulnerable to even the slightest wait for an Orange line train so I took the C&O Canal towpath to Chain Bridge, crossed the Potomac and continued to the meeting at the Difficult Run parking lot from there. Didn't bring a map so I was lucky not to make any serious wrong turns doing this. Arrived a few minutes before the scheduled time.

Handrail course designed by Peggy. Time and distance are approximate. People did this in pairs leapfrogging as to who led each leg but I was the odd man out and did it solo. Then I picked up the course after a few minutes rest. A few of the handrails were subtle and/or not things one typically thinks of as handrails in quite the obvious way trails and streams and so on are.

C • Examples? 3

I didn't have time to do the compass course (seven? legs involving going up and over something to the control to force you to use the compass to hit it though there was inevitably some possibility of correcting your direction by reading the terrain) but Dave Onkst and I each picked up half the course and then converged on the fourth control, then continued from there to meet everyone else for lunch beside one of the parking lots inside the park.

Line-O in the technical flat rocky (though vast amounts of the rock is bedrock mapped as knolls rather than boulders) area downstream from the visitor center above the cliffs. Map printed at 1:5,000 and would really need to be resurveyed to sprint standards to be only moderately difficult to interpret. I moved very slowly but I'm happy that I was able to stay on the line everywhere but the last hundred or so meters approaching the last control where the map utterly stopped making sense. I rehung the second last control when I spotted it slightly off the line, turned my map over to check and found that it was on the memory course and was supposed to be on the line. Very good thing to do, particularly for us in QOC with our generally less detailed terrain. I'm a little bit surprised at the amount of reported difficulty from some experienced orienteers making sense of this area. It was admittedly hyper-technical and deciding what met the standard to be on the map was tough but a lot of the difficulty seemed to consist of a stubborn refusal of the mind to look at all these things made of stone and think "dot knoll". I would have expected that adjustment to be easier to make than it seems to have been.

Memory-O using the controls that were on the line-O plus two more. Challenging but not intimidatingly so and a helpful reminder of the need to simplify and decide on attackpoints and collecting/catching features before you start running. I had to work to not dash off after only the amount of map reading I typically do during a standard course when I can look again to flesh out my mental picture of the leg.

Picking up the memory/line-O controls and jogging on to rendez-vous with the remainder of the group down in the southern part of the park for the final exercise.

Sort of a control picking/starburst/sprint - somewhat fewer than 20 controls all very close together and everyone started with a different one in a mass start then circulated mostly counter-clockwise through the remainder with different routings through small clumps of controls to raise the confusion engendered by seeing other runners. Overran my first control low and missed another on about midway through that I was reading as being on one side of a spur/ridge when it was actually just over the top of it.

Thanks to Peggy and Nadim and the weather gods for a great day in the woods.

Peggy and Nadim kindly dropped me off on the District line just off Connecticut Avenue. I biked home from there with grocery shopping on the way.

Cold but not windy this time on the way in. Headed straight home, cancelling notions of Fellini and/or Cronenberg films at the AFI or a piano recital at the Freer in favour of being well rested for Peggy's training on Saturday - almost certainly a good idea.

Commute in on a genuinely cold morning by DC standards against headwinds up around 15 to 20 mph with gusts to 30. Then to PCRM, then to the AFI in Silver Spring, then home with a stop at a Safeway on the way so I could buy stamps with which to mail my Florida A meet entry.

C • Happy birthday. Did you mea... 10

Run in through Rock Creek Park - short snow squall just after crossing the district line.

C • Running 3

Bike in. Sunny day. Felt warmer than the weather channel that gives conditions at BWI claimed - may have to return to opening a window to gauge the temperature.

Home with some grocery shopping along Connecticut Avenue.

C • Temperature 5

Cool - we appear to have Ivar Helgesen logging his training. (I'm going to stipulate that this is cool even if I'm way off-base and that isn't the name of one of the world's premier basemappers).

Also, I think it's kind of cool that looking at the Browse Training view seems to give me (on one occasion, at least) Google ads for Canadian florists. I can understand the Canadian bias since there are way more people showing as "******, Canada" than for any US state or other country, but I haven't figured out the floral angle yet - if there are any, let alone many, floral themed names on AP, I've failed to pick up on it.

C • Diversity of users 1

Abdominal/back/glute exercises.

Silly walks starting outside my front door - meant to go to grass but it was raining lightly so I decided to stay on pavement.

Bike to work on damp roads - could have been much worse. Home by way of Takoma Park and my dance class.

Class started later than scheduled and ended yet more later than scheduled and included slightly less standing around watching others dance. Turns out my apparently inadequate efforts to retain the choreography Helanius taught us last week were more than adequate because the first thing he did after the warmup was pair me and 7 other people up and send us off to learn a completely different bit of choreography from a couple of dance majors who had worked with him on another piece that he'd decided to extract some movements from.