Training Log Archive: iansmith

Neighbourhood run. Right achilles was tight.

I decided yesterday and confirmed this morning that I would not be running the Middle today. First, logistics: at minimum yesterday, I would have spent six hours traveling to and from, waiting for, participating in, and waiting after the sprint, which should have been a 20 minute race. My assessment was not aided after spending an extra 30 minutes in traffic leaving Montreal. Certainly much of that time was spent socializing and seeing friends, but the opportunity cost is high. Second, my fitness is so bad that the races are a prolonged sufferfest. I remember what it was like to have more gears, to be able to push harder, and it's frustrating to be so inept. It has been a pleasant trip, and I was especially glad to see many friends and comrades, old and new. I plan for circumstances to be better on my next outing - both my preparation and external pressures.

Running in circles in quarantine + drills in the vain effort to bluff my body into thinking it was ready for a race effort.

My watch ran out of power literally at the start line, so distance and climb are guesses. This, predictably, was a disaster of a race. Virtually no training this year has left me too weak, too slow, and the past six days of somewhat intense efforts have left me debilitated albeit inspired. I set out with expectations of sluggish suffering, and in that I was not disappointed. The course was about 30% too long, which meant that at my pace, I was running a Spriddle. I did enjoy the campus and course, and for the most part made good decisions. My route to 14 was not optimal; I ran to the right of the line through a parking lot, adding perhaps five meters of climb and a sloppy attack through a rough hillside compared to the more elegant left of the line. Controls 15-17 were painful, with about 24m of climb over 250m of running.

Using GSwede and Danny as a benchmark, I finished like 47% back. This is not a surprising result, and I take it as motivation to regain my previous form - which was competent at least, if not particularly fast. It was great to see everyone, to race (sort of) again, and to hold a map. I have also been using my SI-9, which adds a small penalty when everyone else is using SI-ac.

COC Sprint 6 - Splits

Barebones race, long advanced. The terrain was quite flat, with subtle undulations in the terrain and a trail network. I spent most of my time on trails, as the woods were marshy and slow. Kevin Fisher caught me at 9, and I held him off until he passed me at 12. It was a pleasant outing in the woods despite my plodding speed. My left calf was tight after the race.

A small warmup jog.

Barebones 4 - Splits

After lunch, Boris, Katie, Danny and I played minigolf in what clearly was the most important competition of the week.

Results:
Ian - 38
Danny - 42
Katie - 45
Boris - 46

TCP Fundraiser Score-O, Parc Naturel du Lac Jerome.

Today's event was a fun score-O with 36 controls and a 60 minute time limit in a marshy, vague area. Unfortunately, I forgot my watch, so I had no idea what the time was. I started out on the same route as Boris. I was in a pack with him for the first five minutes, when we took different routes. I bumped into him again at 20 minutes and 28 minutes. The woods were extremely wet, with large puddles on basically all the trails. The controls were also surprisingly technical, which made for an interesting challenge. Basically all my legs were 2-4 minutes. I plodded along, and lack of zip in my legs meant it was quite slow at times. I came back to the finish to discover I was 15 minutes overtime. Still, I had a great time in the woods and no particular competitive aspirations. It looks like I collected the second most controls besides Boris, though I did have extra time to do so. I only collected four controls in my bonus time.

Katie and I went into Ottawa and wandered around Parliament Hill before driving to St. Jerome.

Warmup jog with Boris before the qualification sprint in Confederation Park. It was steadily but lightly raining.

O-fest knockout sprint qualifier in Confederation Park. This was a nominally 2.1 km urban sprint among buildings and grassy areas. I started reasonably well, and was in 8th place after 10 fairly trivial controls. I then decided to skip 11; I somehow thumbed to 12, which was quite close by.

The mispunch aside, the rest of the course had one glaring challenge. There was a stairwell on a long leg from 12-13 that was in bounds on the map, but barricaded off by caution tape and a fence. The start had made a note about a OOB stair that was mapped as passable, but it claimed that this would not affect route choice. In fact, the stairwell was the obvious route to 13 and 15-16, and avoiding it meant running an extra 2 minutes around a building. I concluded it was OOB and ran around, but this was not universally the case. I then misread another route existing from 15-16 (which was just the stairwell); I estimate this cost me four minutes.

Other than that, I was just slow. Had I not MP'd, I would have finished 12th with my staircase adventures. Without my staircase adventure, in the best case, I might have finished around 8th, about five minutes back of Danny. It looks like six of the top seven finishers in my heat took the stairs.

The course was nominally 2.1 km with 20m of climb, but it had a 15 minute winning time, even using the staircase.

We spent about 90 minutes hanging out in a U Ottawa building (Jock Turcot Centre) before the knockout sprints. At first, it wasn't clear if I would be able to run another sprint, as I was not listed on the consolation sprint heats, but that error was apparently rectified.

The quarterfinals were from 1-2, so I spent some time spectating before my consolation heat at 2:20. Eric Kemp had also mispunched and was in my heat, so it was fairly clear who would win. The race had a few traps, especially with high and low controls, but was mostly a physical battle. BigE had run away from me by control 4, and I merrily plodded along at my pace, battling with a number of other racers to the end. I was one of the few runners not using an SIAC, so I had to punch like a luddite.