Training Log Archive: Thraws

Drink at the Fox with Heather, Andy, Ali et al. Home in the dark.

Thorney Island is usually out of bounds so this was a good opportunity to visit a little-seen area. As the map memory looked the most interesting exercise, and probably the most useful, I did it first. Despite running through a ditch on the way to 2 I was going well and taking it easy. But I picked up speed near the end of the memory section and failed to notice that 9 had legs for 10 and 11. So when I got to 10 there were no map segments. I thought someone had taken them and jogged back to the start (1.5 km) to report it. Doh! I never got to do the second half of the course and was actually a minute ahead of the eventual leader when I stopped.

Did the 'corridor' after the frustration of the map memory because it was next longest and I wanted a proper run. In fact, it wasn't a corridor exercise as the whole map was shown and the navigation was very easy (red standard). Many of the controls was the same as the 'memory' so I got round this pretty quickly and ended with the fastest time by about five minutes.

This was the best exercise, a sprint/urban race but on a 1:10,000 map. So it didn't look very far but was actually quite long for a race of this sort. My big right toe was hurting after exercise two, so I wasn't sure how this would go. In the event I never noticed it once I started running. My technique was to try and match the big black squares on the map with the buildings on the ground, and it worked. My routes, APs and flow were all fine and I didn't really have reason to be displeased with anything. Army sprints and me just seem to get on.

Fancied doing something after a quiet day, so drove to club night for my first taste of street-O. This started with a path run to a micro course between about 12 trees. I lost a few places here as I kept overshooting and even had to unfold the map a couple of times to check codes. After about 4 minutes we were out on the street course, and I just went for the nearest control, hoping to get them all. Couldn't get into the scale, as road junctions wouldn't seem to come up, and quickly realised that although hills weren't mapped they were certainly there! So I did the eastern half clockwise, leaving two which were long out and back legs, then back past the start to the flatter bit. I had roughly planned the western half, clockwise, by this time. With an eye on the watch, I left one more near the top of the hill, and had four easy controls on the way to the finish, plus an optional extra. I went for this, but lost time when I overshot the footpath, so had to leave one of the easy ones. Got 18/22 and my Garmin (edge of piece of paper) says I ran 10.6 km. (I'll find the OS map and work out the considerable climb.) I'd left 5 mins 30 secs for the 1.3 km sprint race, and might have done it too, but some of the SI units were in odd places and I wasted time searching for them (no flags). I was just over a minute late so had my street score reduced by two. Lots of people had scored 15, so I guess they just ignord the eastern set of controls. Really enjoyable little event and good workout.