Training Log Archive: graeme

Don't know how to log this - hanging, checking, watching, collecting at Falkirk.

SprintScotland Race 3
Well, I was never going to turn down the chance to plan a WRE. Hallglen is one of the best sprint areas around and so it was disappointing that we had to use the town centre.

The area is about quarter square km, essentially defined by the inner ring road. It was obviously going to be a challenge to squeeze the distance in. Various ideas can and went - starting west or south of the ring road would need a timed-out crossing which I didn't consider, although Jon X managed it well yesterday. Dollar park NW of the centre looked a possibility until the council told us their offices would be a building site, leaving a long dead section. Other early drafts cutting through shopping centres or the Asda underground carpark not nixed as too risky. With 2 weeks to go, I'd hoped to put the mens #2 in the churchyard. then the ever-changing building works in Newmarket St meant we couldn't risk crossing that either. Not much was left.

So I was pleased to find the 2 mins arc on the edge of the map around Asda, ducking in and out of the foliage. This seemed to produce many small misses in the 5sec range, and hopefully made it hard to setting into a rhythm. 4-5 was a nice route choice (pretty balanced between several options). The discovery that the bus stops has been moved here meant a late addition of OOB. Some may have been confused why a perfectly normal bit of pavement
was OOB, for anyone arriving as a bus disgorged its contents it would have been obvious. The underpass-overpass railway loop was included for variety, with lots of sharp turns to challenge maintaining the pace, surprising to see some mistakes on the bridge crossing 5-6. Then a route choice leg which in its early incarnation crossed the whole map NS (181-195ish), but one Newmarket St became no-go had to be broken down. The wriggling in alleys south of the High St. felt like proper quality city-centre nav, and the disused bus station added a post-apocalyptic feel before a return wriggle in the alleys.


MO won by Henry McNulty in 1345, a quality redemption after not qualifying for the KO sprint. WO went to Laura Robertson in 1508, completing an Antipodean clean sweep. The trimming of the men's course #2 meant the women's was likely to run longer, but I'm going to blame the trimming of the whole WOC2022 team from the start list for being over 15.

On review, there were no decisive routechoice legs, but lots of opportunity for 5sec errors. Hopefully enough breaking up of running to make the more "procedural" sections hard to run cleanly without hesitation. I'm looking forward to planning on a decent sized area (but euromeeting is even smaller, heigh-ho).


The public races got up to Hallglen. I could have worked harder on those courses, but Hallglen is so tricky I felt the first thing out of the box would work. Callander Park was conveniently so overgrown that it was easy to set courses which stayed on the paths. I expected the relative simplicity of the map, plus the speed of downhill running, would catch many out. It did mean a long walk to the start, but we sorted potential mitigation for driving full cars to and fro, and putting the 12s on the elite start so that seemed acceptable.

Anyone reading this far can get the acknowledgements. Lots of people but especially Peds for the excellent mapping, calm organisation and extensive background liaison. MPA has moved to paying its organisers, and its a complete bargain.

C • Excellent courses 3

Some learnings.
It was possible to look across the road from the prestart to see WO go left and MO go right, though not the actual flag. Very satisfying to see the gawpers miss the control!
Two controls on "top of fence/wall". This should mean you can punch from either side, even if the wall is uncrossable. Should have said so in the bulletin. Unfortunately some carwash action made the south (higher) side to 199 less accessible.
Start list was meant to have women-only for the last 10mins. Don't know what went wrong, but especially after early MO changed to be the same as WO it was non-ideal starting faster women with not-fastest men.
Barriers; Not generally a fan, but transformative for this area, but do rather force all the courses to be similar. Also, what works on the way outs doesn't the way back. I wonder if one could have different barriers on each side of a map flip, policed on the ground to be unidirectional.
People think there's a difference between "Mandatory passage through out of bounds area" and an out of bounds area with only one way through. Not quite sure what it is - I think you have to take the red line to the mandatory passage, but not the unique way through.

Alloa KOS Quali. 61/64+2.

Easy urban in the centre, 20sec road cross map exchange, Didn't think to look at terrain beyond the map exchange during the 20 sec, and duly ran straight into a 90sec trap. Would have been game over if the game had ever been on. Wall on the far side of the carpark wiggled back and fort and feature a path through the free on the far side and two lots of stairs. None of which went through. Felt like a bit of a trick (especially after Ted wrote "No tricks" every time I tried something.

Fun race around the estate, with 15sec start interval.

Had expected a regular length sprint race, and just getting the 6 min KO semi course was disappointing. Far, far too slow. Every split in the bottom 5, and yet still able to get lowest position on the run in!

Not sure what the 15 sec was about, didn't seem to generate much head-to-head and felt a bit like getting us out the way.

Overall, didn't learn much from running WRE, would have done better to run public race.

C • Non-qualifier afternoon option 34

Orienteering/gardening biathlon in callender park. Had always planned to make short one pathway, which turned out to involve a lot of work. Also, one ride and one path were quite badly overgrown and needed a lot of clearing.

Vague plan to check-test run the WRE went out the window. Too tired.

Control collecting

WupCD, jogging around, helping chores

In and out. Feeling crap, probably apprehensive about the weekend.

Step chasing jog around AA

Dalkeith prestonpans loop with the newly minted Dr kirsz.

Seat to shore with jane, stopping to buy lemons on the way home. And beer, because when life give you lemons, it's what you do.

In and out

Meadows 428 28 25 26 28. Quite hard work tonight, for which it would have been nice to get faster times. But tick, done,

Would. Easy with James and briefly with kitch. All sorts of people do the meadows these days.

In and out twice

In and home. Weary