Training Log Archive: Bash

NavStock Long Course. After a good sleep last night, I felt much better today. It was still way too hot, but that's good preparation for racing in B.C. I started off slowly, but felt great in the second half and ran fairly quickly - for me. Didn't make any huge errors and really enjoyed being out in the woods today - well, except for that nasty 5-10 minutes after I learned that O pants do NOT protect you from stinging nettles. Fun course with lots and lots and lots of climbing. I much prefer longer O races like this one. Really nice terrain.

NavStock Sprint. Mom says I failed naptime in kindergarten, and I'm not much better at it now. I slept 2 hours after last night's adventure run - not surprising when you consider that the sky was brightening when I went to bed, and a skunk was noisily attacking a garbage bag in our group campground area.

Anyway, that's a roundabout way of getting to the main theme of today's sprint, which was "stupidity". It was a nicely designed course, making good use of a small area of forest. I stumbled and bumbled around like a drunkard for almost an HOUR. On a SPRINT course! I would get these clear-as-a-bell thoughts popping into my mind, like "go due north 50 meters from the trail" - and sometimes I'd even say them out loud, but then I'd realize that I couldn't remember whether I'd already crossed a trail, so I'd have to go back - sometimes to the previous control - and start again. I'd expected to be physically tired after last night's race, but that factor never came into play at all. The wheels simply weren't turning in my brain this morning.

NavStock Middle Distance. This afternoon went much better than this morning, and I took only 10 minutes longer to do a course with 3.5 km more distance. Yahoo, I'm not going to stay stupid forever! However, my brain was working in its granny gear, so although I made fairly good nav decisions (with a couple of small glitches), I was thinking ve-e-e-ry slowly. It was SO hot. Swimming in Bass Lake after the race was a highlight of the day.

World 3-Legged String Orienteering Championship. Bent and I took top honours in the fiercely competitive Husband-Wife category, absolutely demolishing the pathetic times set by Hammer and Griz with their respective partners (both of them still in elementary school). Bent nearly catapulted me head-first into the huge boulder at the finish line. I wonder if orienteering insurance would cover that sort of thing...? (Hmmm.... maybe I'd better check to see if Bent has taken out life insurance on me!)

Two warm up / cool downs for two races.

Event: Nav-Stock
 

NavStock Night Adventure Run with Hingo and Bent. Sure, it's tougher to navigate through the woods at night, but at least you know it will be nice and cool, right? WRONG. It was hot, humid and smoggy, and only two team members were carrying water. (Hingo's bladder exploded during the first climb.) (Which sounds like an even worse problem than it was, if you're not familiar with Camelbaks. ;-) )

We loved adventure running at night! I hope there are future night adventure runs - this was the first. We've done enough overnight adventure races that it felt perfectly natural to be running around in the dark. Our route choices were conservative, with more trail running than usual and very obvious attackpoints. The three of us split up for the Matrix (as usual, 2 CPs for Bent and 1 each for Hingo and me) and arrived at the next CP closer together than we ever have - all within a few minutes. Only one serious nav problem when we got onto the wrong ridge looking for CP6 and descended too far, but Hingo did an awesome job of relocating us when we hit a couple of unexpected trails.

Bent wasn't feeling his best in the heat, but valiantly towed me on the longer trail and road sections. That's riskier at night, since I often glance at the map when I'm on tow and usually have some peripheral vision to avoid ankle-turning rocks. Ouch! Oh well, if I keep my ankle injury-free, I'll never become a real orienteer like Hammer.

The race was lots of fun, a well-designed course by Griz, and a good result for the Tree Huggers: 2nd Coed by 8 minutes, and 5th overall. Also a new personal record of a different kind - driving to a campground shower building at 3:45 a.m.!

Wildlife report: We only saw the scary ones tonight. While I was on tow on a paved residential road, Bent suddenly yanked to the left to avoid a skunk standing 2 meters away with its tail up, facing away from us. Yikes! Then on the final run over the ski hill, Hingo gave me a full body tackle as he skilfully leapt out of the path of a porcupine.

Mountain bikers have an image problem in some circles in Caledon, so ThunderDog and I went to Albion Hills to pick up garbage left along trails by the 24 Hour relay racers. I wanted ThunderDog to have a good hike and go swimming in the river because she is having back surgery on Monday and will need to rest for awhile. To my surprise, she kept the pace rather high. I wasn't going to count this as training time, but for awhile she had me jogging with occasional lunges to scoop up gel wrappers, so I'll count 40 minutes at level 1 for the 80 minutes that we were out there.

No wildlife to report today, so I can only provide a post-bike-race garbage report:

85% Gel packs and pieces thereof (Geez, if someone is strong enough to carry in a full gel pack, then surely they're strong enough to carry out the empty wrapper.)
10% Water bottles
5% Miscellaneous, including bike parts no longer attached to the bike

Rode to Albion Hills with Bent and followed the 24 Hour race course with a few deviations just for fun. We're supposed to do intervals today, and these are most easily done indoors on a spinning bike, but that would be a crime on a beautiful day! So we tried to go hard for 15 min. X 2, 10 min. X 1, with 15 min. off in between, more or less. I'm not sure if we accomplished what we're supposed to, but trail riding always consists of short intervals anyway, so hopefully we're getting stronger. Based on the results of our most recent adventure race, the discipline I should be focusing on is road biking (yuck).

The only wildlife spotted today was Sean Ruppel of Chico Racing, busy taking down the course and cleaning up hundreds of discarded gel packs. I think I might go back with ThunderDog for a gel pack-picking-up hike.

Trail run around Palgrave on a hot, sticky day - plus intervals described in a separate entry below. I'm getting acclimatized to the heat, which will help in my events in central B.C. - but I have every intention of continuing to complain about it! I've found it easier to keep up my pace in the woods since the recent article in the local paper about black bears being picked up in Markham and Richmond Hill.

Vegetation Report: An extremely healthy crop of poison ivy. The wild strawberries are ripe - mmmm.

Wildlife Watch: 1 deer right outside our front door and a cute baby turtle bravely "running" the same trail that I was. Also a few mosquitoes who have no qualms about biting through Spandex.

Speaking of which...
West Nile Watch: Only 4 dead birds have tested positive for the virus in Ontario this year, all of them in the eastern part of the province. This is way down from last year at this time (23 birds, more widespread), which is good news for those of us who get hundreds (thousands?) of mosquito bites every summer.

Intervals in the middle of the trail run. It's been awhile since I've been able to follow my training plan, so I randomly picked a series that seemed sufficiently painful, yet still possible: 4 min. on, 1 min. off X 5 repetitions. I think the rest periods should probably have been longer. By the end, I was seriously considering taking up pool or bridge as my new sport. (Which probably means that the intervals were about right!)