Training Log Archive: Kat

A run with Boris along the river. We intended to go out for a short recovery run (30-40 minutes easy) but the weather was so gorgeous and sunny and there were swans and geese all along the river to look at, so we ended up going to Port Meadow and back. We stopped for a few minutes there to look at the cows and stretch. It felt great!

JK Relay! I ran the second leg of a men's premier relay. The entire relay team was Boris on first leg, then me, followed by Chris Wroe on the third leg and Mike Waddington on the fourth. Boris did a good job staying with the pack on the first leg, but unfortunately had to wait for me for 1-2 minutes when he got back because after jogging around there for several minutes I realized that I was supposed to pick up my map before starting and went to the tent to do that...

I started off running down the taped route to the start triangle feeling totally confused. I was trying to orient the map, get my jacket off, and keep moving in the right direction all at once. Therefore, I was very tentative on my way to the first control. After that though, I began to speed up. Turning the map over constantly to look at the control descriptions made me mess up several times and slowed me down, but I still ended up finishing with a decent time. I finished right in the middle of a pack of about 43 people on my course (forking CAD). And this was despite having made 9-10 minutes of mistakes.

Today's racing was somewhat similar to yesterday in that I just felt like going fast and having fun and didn't mind the mistakes so much. Too bad I can't really compare finish splits with anybody. Most people stopped to rest a bit after tagging the next person before they went to download. That was certainly true in my case. Too bad, because I sprinted down that long finish chute. :)

I started to do some cool-down jogging, but decided to walk instead because my blisters were hurting me. I haven't had blisters since I've started wearing Swoop orange shoes for orienteering, but Sunday was very wet and muddy and I got some on the bottoms of my feet. After I changed into sneakers, though, I did a lot of walking around the assembly area and did some stretching.

The start for the second day of the JK was 2.8 km away from the assembly area. I jogged the flats and some of the hills and walked on the down-hills.

Second day of the JK weekend. The course started out with some technically easy legs with lots of trail running and ended with some shorter technical controls in a hilly bit. After yesterday's dissapointing day, I just wanted to get out there and run. I didn't care about much else besides getting to run fast and finish the course. And this is exactly what I did. As a result, I ended up 40th out of about 90 people on my course, with some of the best splits and some of the worst. My split rankings (out of 90 people) were:

2, 39, 8, 75, 3, 73, 10, 3, 14, 2, 22, 19, 85, 85, 26, 21, 3

I made some silly mistakes. For example, the reason my split to #4 was one of the slowest was because I did an extra loop on trails (a silly mistake due to not double-checking my compass). My 73rd best split to #6 was also due to a stupid error - looking for a reentrant instead of a pit led to considerable confusion. (I should check the control descriptions even if the feature looks obvious from the map.) Then, there are those two 85th best splits, which are both due to running around like a headless chicken once near the control circle instead of carefully trying to relocate.

Despite having about 21 minutes in mistakes, I still felt good after this course. It was nice to feel fast and to finish a course after yesterday.

Cool-down running with Ollie after the race. Very nice weather today!

Running to the start with Boris, since our start times were two minutes apart. We ran part of the way through bracken, in the elite warm-up area.

JK day 1 race at Ilkley Moor. I thought that I would do reasonably well in this race, since it is physically tough (heather and bracken throughout the entire course, as well as hills and rocks) and I like such courses. But, as it turned out, my result was "DNF."

I knew that I had to start out cautiously since the map was 1:15,000 and, given the terrain and my meager experience with this scale, a disaster could happen if I wasn't careful. Nonetheless, I ended up overshooting the first control and having to relocate and come back. The first control was a tough one, though, (a ditch in the middle of bracken, with not much else nearby to help with navigation), so I wasn't really bothered by this. I put it behind me and found number 2 and 3 just fine. (In fact, I had a fastest split to #2, which is really cool since there were almost 100 people doing this course!)

Then came the toughest control I've ever had on a course. It was a long one, about 1.8 km long. Going straight would mean crossing a very steep reentrant and going through rocky stuff. It didn't look good to me. So after a few seconds of looking, I saw a decent route that went around using some trails. I even started off in that direction and got onto the big trail, but then saw other people going across that big reentrant and also saw orienteers heading to the start along the road I was heading for on the trail, and decided to go straight instead. I then went on to twist my ankle crossing that big chasm, stopping a lot to hesitate and despair about my bad route choice along the way, trying to save it by heading up north to a small trail so I wouldn't have to run through the heather and bracken any more, not being able to find it (some of the trails were hard to make out), and eventually spending about 15-20 minutes near the control circle half-heartedly looking for #4. There were many big rocks in that area so I couldn't really run through it, especially since I was trying to keep my ankle safe from further harm. So I sort of climbed around on the rocks for a while, said hi to Ollie twice, and eventually found the control and decided to head back.

I learned some important things today. First, I have to trust myself. Even though I haven't done many long legs, I have looked at enough of them (mostly on Boris' maps) that I know what type of route choices I should look for. I found a decent route choice for this long leg and I should have taken it. Second, I should get over my inhibitions about running near the assembly area, near the start, and so on. I went straight because I didn't want to run on the trails/roads which other orienteers were using to jog up to the start and since I saw other people going straight, I figured that we were probably meant to do that. Well, quite a few people did have to cross there (because there was one control right on the other side), but my control was much farther away and really did not require me to go up and down there. So I should have had more confidence in my route choice.

I've been told before that if I pick a route choice and it's too late to turn back, I should stick to it and execute it well. But I couldn't do that here. I spent the entire leg (which took me about 30 minutes) telling myself I should have gone the other way. It was hard not to think this, because the way straight meant lots of falling, sliding downhill, carefully climbing over rocks, tripping over heather. And all the while I kept thinking about how nice it could have been if I'd taken the "around" route choice of trails and roads. So by the time I was finally near to the control, I was already considering just finding it and heading to the finish. This was a hard decision for me because I have never DNFed before for reasons other than time constraints. To willingly quit a race when I had the time to finish it and was physically able to do so had never even passed my mind before today. This is part of the reason it took me so long to find #4. Once I was close to it, I just walked around debating what I should do. I had neither the heart to run fast nor the will to turn away without finding that damn control. Finally, though, I found it and decided to head back in.

Cool-down run with Boris.

Event: JK 2006
 

After several days of not training, I intended to do this sprint relatively easy - try to hit all of the controls right on and warm-up both my body and my brain for the JK weekend. And to some degree I kept to this - I definitely did not go as fast as I could have. I started out cautiously, confused by the number of controls everywhere without SI units. (I found out later that these other controls were put out for the trail-O.) But I went at a decent pace for most of the race and sort of sprinted to the finish from the last control. (I started sprinting, then slowed down because I wasn't sure where the finish was, then sped up again.)

I wound up second in the women's open category. The funny thing is, if I had actually raced this sprint (rather than did it as a training run) I'm not sure I could have done better. Because if I had gone out with an intention to win and be fast, then I would surely have messed up some controls and my total time would have been slower. Funny how that works.

Someday I hope to do both - go fast and navigate correctly.

C • Sprint-Os 4

Cool-down jogging after the sprint.

Doing the JK training event with Boris an hour or so after the sprint. Unfortunately, I tripped over a root and bruised my left quad in the middle of this, but the pain was gone by the end of the day.