Training Log Archive: iansmith

Warmup run to the start with a few bouts while waiting for my start time. My legs felt springier than yesterday. D'kota, the captain of his high school O-team, and his coach came over to chat with me about the US team briefly. It was neat to see so many enthusiastic and friendly teenagers; I hope some make it to adulthood orienteering. I think this reinforces the importance of the National Team making an appearance at Interscholastics and A-meets more generally. Boris, Ken, the JNT Juniors and I all wore various Team USA regalia.

I was a little pissed after yesterday's run and resolved to fight harder today; I wanted it to hurt more. I tweaked my ankles a few times during the race, but they were never severe enough to cause more than a moment of discomfort and a slight slowing. Visibility was again so high and features so big that it was hard to mess up too badly, but the 1:15 scale made reading some of the finer details - like copious erosion gullies - difficult. I also elected to run without calf protection, which was unfortunate as the brambles were thicker today.

My bigger mistakes were route choice: 30s at 10, 40s at 16, 20s at 20. On execution, I lost 15s at 2 to hesitation, 10s at 3 to overlooking a reentrant covered by the numbers, 10s at 8 to hesitation, 15s at 9, 30 more seconds at 10 going to the wrong reentrant, 10s at 17 hesitating, and 20s at 22 overshooting my attack. I lost 15s each at 18 and 19 going to the wrong feature in the circle. Total route loss = 1:30, 2:20 execution. Again, Ken was stronger; he smoked Boris and I by 10s on 13, a trivial 60s leg that I didn't err.

The course setting was great and made excellent use of the terrain. Yesterday had a bit more route choice and more climb, but the course was still delightfully varied. I think the biggest takeaways - apart from a general need to get faster - are that I need to do more terrain training. Climb and squishy, variable ground are foreign.

CSU swept the podium, which was great. I talked with some of the interscholastic folks during Boris' course review and acquainted myself with the JNT juniors better. It was also fun hanging out with Clem and Jeremy.

Must get faster.

C • Jesus mode 3

Blue - Splits

Event: Georgia Navigator Cup / Southeast Interscholastics Championships
 

Day 1 of the Navigator Cup, Red Top Mountain State Park; a lethargic performance. The terrain was open and fast, with rolling hills and reentrants in Piedmont Appalachia. I made about 2:00 of execution errors, and 2:00 of route choice errors. The woods were so visible and the features so large that making big mistakes was difficult.

My warmup was a little shorter than I wanted; my legs felt heavy and sluggish. I couldn't find my O-socks; I thought I had left them back in Boston, but it turns out they were in the bottom of my suitcase. Fail. Anyway, I ran with compression sleeves instead. I've never run with them, so I don't know if they contributed to my general feeling of slowness.

I never felt spritely in the woods, and in comparing splits with Boris and the Keninator, I was running more slowly and losing 10-15s on basically every leg. I'm disappointed by my performance today, but hopefully I can improve in the next few weeks.

I made a 30s error in the circle at 1 when I wasn't confident and had to trundle along the reentrant for a little while to find the cliff. I also knocked the stand over when I punched, so I spent maybe 10s prospecting to put it back up. I made a parallel error at 7 where I exited 6 the wrong way and took a suboptimal route via the road, losing about 45s. I lost 45s total on 3 and 4 with a bad route choice. I then lost about 60s total on route choice to 16 and 17. Excepting the (erroneous) finish split, I beat Ken and Boris on only 6 of 32 possible person-splits, which sort of tells the story of this race. It was cool for CSU to decisively sweep the podium.

Warmup jog on the model map and a run to the start.

Cool down run.

Blue - Splits

Easy run, 1 cm snow, icy.

In exciting news, my log has just passed 100,000 views! I suppose my quirky logging nuances, digressions, and diatribes are more captivating than my actual training, but I'm still humbled and delighted that people have taken an interest in reading my log. Two AP logs have more hits than I and are newer - tRicky and murraystraining.

Tonight's workout was a 20 min tempo run at 4:03/km, postponed from yesterday. Conditions were moderate; -4 C, breezy, and a light snowfall. There was about a cm of snow on the ground with some patches of black ice. After a long warmup, I turned on my 180 bpm techno. I focused on feeling relaxed for the first few km, and my pace was steady and good. I started hurting a bit over the last km - I think more due to the stresses of the cadence than the speed. I hit a few patches of ice, but I think my foot placement is directly beneath my center of mass - I didn't fall or slide, I just lost traction.

C • River lights 2

Easy run to work. I felt progressively worse throughout the day - fatigued; I suspect I'm coming down with an illness. I cancelled my tempo plans.