Training Log Archive: iansmith

Warmup before the Middle Distance race. I didn't leave quite enough time to prepare to my satisfaction; I arrived at the about ten minutes before the first call up. While running along the trail to warm up and reading the map, I tried to get into a race mindset.

NAOCs Middle Distance race at Adam's Creek in Dingham's Ferry, PA.

In summary, my race was unremarkable. I knew the terrain was technical - in particular, the vegetation was intricate. I haven't run much recently on maps with complex vegetation, or with maps with vegetation sufficiently well mapped to really pay attention to it, so that was a novelty. I would say that I struggled to race, but it's hard to define that: while I was concentrating and running, I lacked the urgency, imperative, and impervious focus that characterizes "race mode." Perhaps I'm indulging meaningless psychological speculation, but it seemed a problem to me.

Apart from not being fully engaged, I made a few costly bobbles - notably on 3, 4, 7, 11, and 12.

Finish chute is too loooong.

Middle - Blue - Splits

Event: 2012 North American Orienteering Championships
 

Easy run in to work to check the status of the legs. They felt ok.

Ghettotrack. Ran home while listening to Unbroken, a best selling account of a track star's survival in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II. It is promising so far, about 12% through the book. The time is an estimate as I forgot my watch, but my pace was very relaxed and comfortable.

Profiles in Courage
Also note the sweet 70-200mm L; it looks like an F4.

Plan for this week:
While I'm not at a peak in my training, I want to have the best races I can produce at NAOC. My goal is to finish in the top 30 in all three races, with a reach goal of top 20. I can benchmark my performance against the usual suspects - Ken, the Zhyk, Giacomo, Eddie. I plan to have an easy M-W, with 5 mile runs each day; I will rest on Thursday. I shouldn't have any trouble getting enough running in at the end of October to exceed 100 miles for the month. The most important race to me is the long; I need to manage my endurance and my technical focus. While I can't directly control the results relative to the field, I want three solid races - with no mistakes bigger than two minutes.

Evening toodle around Cambridge, centered around a trip down my trusty, wind-sheltered Franklin St. Ghettotrack. I ran in silence and contemplated my life. Every step is a victory.

Event: NEOC: Boxford
 

Green course at Boxford State Forest. I arrived at the meet site quite late, and while I intended to help out with control pickup, I was still frantic in my effort to arrive, prep, and start my course. The start box had already been picked up, so I started from the registration tent rather than the 300m distant start.

I had decided to schedule Boxford after Tim Parson visited the site and concluded the terrain was sufficiently interesting. It was understood that the map was ancient and in need of revision, but the contours were adequate - as adequate as they had been when the map was first created, which is to say not very. Expanding the set of maps NEOC uses for local meets has been a goal of mine, and Mika Latva-Kokko agreed to run the meet. His meet at Harold Parker last November was very successful. With Turtle Pond, this is the second old map to be resurrected this fall. Jim Crawford and Peter Gagarin introduced entirely new maps in the spring at Mt. Misery and Earl's Trails, so it's been a reasonably novel year.

Out of the start, I struggled to make sense of the trails. I actually stopped before the start to check out a piece of asphalt before moseying on down the trail. I took what looked to me to be the best route - a trail run left of the line, a push across a set of marshes, and an attack from a second trail. My attack was very poor, and I lost contact quickly. I was pushing too fast and made very little sense of the contours. I bailed fairly quickly, but found relocating challenging; I estimate I lost about eight minutes meandering in the woods. My attack to control 2 was similarly bad for a loss of about two minutes - I attacked from the end of the marsh, but struggled to interpret the contours. Controls 3-8 were improved apart from a small bobble at 7, but I found the area around 9 tricky and lost around 30 seconds poking around before spotting the control. I attacked prematurely to 10 and found myself well south of the control before turning north and hitting the stone wall. I made a 90 second error on the finish leg running down the wrong trail because I lost focus.

Overall, today was not a good day. Certainly some of that is the sketchiness of the map, but the contours aren't so convoluted to justify these big mistakes. Lessons:

1. Prepare for your race. A good warm up and a calm, focused mindset are critical.
2. Have a solid first control. Especially in unfamiliar terrain, it is far better to slow down and be very accurate than to run faster than I can process. Better to lose a minute or two to speed than ten to errors. You can only orienteer on the edge of control if you have first established where that boundary lies.
3. Always have a plan. Both controls 1 and 2 were in part due to poor execution near the circle. Once I had connected with the second trail, the attack to control 1 should have been trivial.

Control pickup. I didn't actually know what courses were being picked up. I had seen a cadre of kids marching out boldly picking up nearby controls, so I reran to Green #1 (in about 8:45, rather than the 18 minutes on my course run), then wandered around on the far end of the map checking control sites. I ran into Dean at the 7th control I checked - green #5 - and received instructions to pick up Green 6-10. Running with less urgency gave me more of an opportunity to explore the map, though I made a remarkably foolish error approaching control 8, which I had executed acceptably during the race. The map certainly was lacking in places, but my deviation from straight while using my compass is unacceptable and only loosely related.

C • Boxford 1

Green - Splits

Ghettotrack.