Training Log Archive: Psuba

TVOC day event, Penn Hill.

Not yet fully gotten rid of my jet lag so I was getting there quite early for myself, elected to get out and run early as well. So didn't see that many people in the woods.

Jegor started 1 m ahead, saw him as there were a few doglegs to begin with going 1-2 as I was going to 1, then 3-4 as I was going to 3, of course not again until download :)

I was starting probably too cautiously, saw someone from RAFO starting a minute behind catching me up to #5 - I was probably choosing too safe a route to #4 and then messing up route choice to #5, so he was then following me through the next few controls where I did not make any more mistakes. As I was getting nearer to the timed out road crossing I made a conscious decision to speed up, and setting myself a goal to get rid of him after the crossing or at least let him ahead at the crossing without losing time, so he wasn't getting a toe. He wasn't interested in setting off first from the control after the crossing, so I decided to try and push ahead from him on the long leg, and I managed to get to the woods far ahead so he didn't see me - never saw him again. Mini mission accomplished! Unfortunately from here I started to feel physically that I wasn't on top form (holiday and all + last 4 days running), so probably started to slow down (from Splitbrowser, this is where I was the highest position in the field). Slow in the undergrowth relative to people ahead, and then I made a directional error vegetation pushing me coming out of 15 to the path N. Quick to relocate, but still quite a bit of time lost here relative to the leg length (about 30s). Lost time on 17 which is surprising as I wasn't really making a mistake but likely made a route choice error to go through stuff - probably others were faster curving around vegetation. ALso lost about 1 min to No. 18 - not entirely sure what happened there, I was both step counting and looking for the green patches - for some reason I must have gone one patch further as I had to run backwards once in the med green to get to the control. Annoying.
No more mistakes from here on, but was really feeling my legs so was simply too slow.

Event: Southern Night Championships / SCOL4 TVOC Level C & Regional Event
 

Southern Night Championships, Penn Wood.

Various things happened but all boiled down to what starts to become my trademark for races, got there just in time, as in... I got to the start exactly when I was called up. So much for proper warmup/stretching...

That didn't really help to begin with. I started in the rain so it was difficult to see (and my eyes watered up often anyway in the cold). Nevertheless, 1-2 was reasonably safe (but not very fast), I have messed up the route to 3 though. Not yet in the mindset so I faffed about in the undergrowth not keeping direction so took a long time to get out to a road - it was OK from there to 3 but I lost probably 1:30 minutes just there. What followed was another mess-up to #4, I didn't have a perfect attackpoint, and dived into the woods from the open area a bit too late, expecting the fence behind the control to stop me if I have overshot things and then relocate from the fence corner. Would have worked if I wasn't so far ahead that I ended up only getting to the fence after a few kinks in it... took a while till I believed I was that far away and ran all the way back with the fence to the control. Lost about 4:40 mins there! From here on I started to do more pace counting which I should have done from earlier on to avoid such big mistakes, and so was a bit safer most of the controls. A couple of smaller misses towards the S of the map - amounting to maybe 1 min but nothing compared to the big losses. Then a 2:30 loss that I will attribute to the map: coming down the hill back towards the N part of the map I simplified my task to "run downhill and take the first path left", unfortunately there was an unmapped path leading into the OOB forest at the edge of the map... Clearly the mapper didn't think it made any difference, but as another path further up the hill was mapped, I wasn't expecting to find anything there and so took it. Taken a while until it got suspicious and then to figure out what happened before I had to trace my path back!
No real big mistakes from that point on, one may argue with some of my suboptimal routes (I was taking it safe), but as I wasn't making mistakes in the night I was OK with the last part of the course - apart from my physical shape, even though at the last bit I could keep up with some M18 youngsters.

So about 8:40 just from the big mistakes, that would have got me close to Geoff, which is surprising given my shape. Not sure what Paul did to miss a few of the last controls!

C • Battery 2

Test "ran" the 11 Dec event to check my planning for the control placings. Didn't run the order in which I expect people to do so, but tried to make sure the obvious things are correct. I'll do a few minor adjustments on the map and control placings.

HR Control run.
Back in the cold! First run back from the 26-30 deg heat and high humidity, quite a shock to get out there in -1.

Legs are quite stiff after travels etc. so chose to actually run a slow HR control session and concentrate on running technique. Will need to pick up distance over the next weeks to do proper winter training, but back from vacation this was a good start.