Training Log Archive: jtorranc

12.4

Warmup/cooldown/rest between repetitions.

4x1217m intervals in 4:33, 4:38, 4:45 and 4:50. Slowness largely due to wet grass, falling darkness and mounting intestinal distress during the last two. Less than full recovery from the weekend and reduced sleep due to delay flying out of Buffalo also somewhat to blame.

Event: QOC Fountainhead
 

US Relay Champs 4 pt team anchor leg - a very good race personally ( just over a minute faster than Wil Smith with the second fastest 4 point red leg after having run the opening green leg for his team) but my Ottawa team had, unfortunately, mispunched on an earlier leg - perhaps just as well we didn't figure that out until after I finished or my motivation might have suffered. Started out on the order of two minutes behind Wil (running unofficially with just Katarina as a teammate) and Sergei running for DVOA. Never saw Sergei at all. Seem to remember catching a glimpse of Wil as I approached control 10 but might have just been someone else in black. Saw much of him from behind during the last several hundred meters in the open. The best race imaginable would have involved more fully formed plans for each leg with less slowing to read the map and make small adjustments en route but never losing map contact is doing pretty well given my previous experiences in kettle moraine terrain. Learning to manage the trick in less steep but extremely complex negative topography will have to be a future project. Then there'll be learning to do it with lower visibility as a complicating factor. I think I could now do much better on some of the maps around Whitehorse than I did in 2004. Ebs Trails may still be another story.

Excellent weekend. Much thanks to everyone in ROC who laboured to make it so.

Event: US Middle Distance and Relay Champs
 

One week to Black Grace - make not other plans.

US Middle Distance Champs - 2nd by 11 seconds to Will Hawkins, with both of us apparently having at least a couple of minutes of errors and presumably benefitting from the rest of the community still shaking off rust from the winter. No big errors but a fair number of controls in the more technical terrain for which I had to slow way down or stop when near the control in order to figure out exactly where to go and/or scan the terrain in hopes of spotting the flag and not having to figure it out - basically, 7 through 12 excepting 11 all felt a little shaky. Pretty sure I agree with Wil Smith that the map around 8 was slightly problematic. Also feel somewhat agrieved over the abundance of unmapped rootstocks north and slightly northwest of the one control 14 was on - a couple of them were much more than big enough to be mapped and we were supposedly looking for the only rootstock within a radius of at least 150 meters.

Letchworth Sprint - 3rd as slightly sloppy route choice and execution and a not quite fully recovered from the morning feeling left me well back of Margus' impressive run but towards the front of the traffic jam between 12:38 and 12:48 that made up 2nd through 6th. Was very lucky that my compass work between 3 and 4 was good because partway there I somehow managed to start looking at 12 to form my picture of what the area around the control would look like - confusing to say the least but just heading due north was enough to save me from paying for a howler of a mental error.

Blue Middle - Splits

Sprint 3 - Splits

Skated to work with a big backpack of mostly clothes for the weekend.

12.1

Home from work by way of PCRM, the Cleveland Park library and the Adams Morgan Safeway. Dirvetrain will have to be replaced as a matter of urgency but first must establish what is to be done about a frame (there's a big crack which I just noticed last week almost done removing the sleeve into which the seat post fits from the rest of the frame and I'm pretty certain that shouldn't happen under normal use but the bike is four or five years old - maybe I'll get a free or cheap replacement under warranty, maybe not, given it's aluminum so there's no endurance limit).

Warmup/cooldown/rest between repetitions.

4x1217m intervals (approximately, it being hard to be certain I started and ended them at the usual spot in the dark) in 4:26, 4:27. 4:27 and, as intestinal distress started to develop, 4:32.

Warmup/cooldown.

Silly walks, 9x100m strides and once up the hill on the way home.

Cycling to work.