Training Log Archive: Bash

DontGetLost Peak-2-Peak

Well, that sure was fun! This year's P2P was a hilly 2-hour score-O in the Dundas Valley with all the controls on hilltops or knolls. The 20 controls were assigned values using ski ratings - green, blue, black diamond or double black diamond. The range of values was large - from 20 points for green to 150 points for double black diamond. There were 1,000 points available in total.

Incredibly, this event attracted 200 runners! It is just past the peak of autumn colour so running in the Valley was spectacular - a nice preview for Raid The Hammer. I headed west first, picking up lower value controls on the north side of the main trail. It wouldn't be a score-style event if GHOSLO and I didn't play leapfrog in the early controls due to his superior nav, and today was no different. I found two Walk-the-Line controls on my way to e=MC2 (3 controls: 2 hills + 1 muddy) without trying too hard, which was great.

Then I picked up the Dog Bone controls and headed down to Vertigo. I found the trail through the dark green vegetation but apparently veered off to the east when I hit open forest. I was aiming for the wrong spur and must have ignored my compass to go there. On the way, I noted that some fences had been removed from the map to make things tougher around this difficult control. (Um, NOT.) Then I got down the hill and didn't see any flags in an area where multiple hilltops were supposed to have flags and we'd have to choose the right one. Huh? I squinted more closely at the map and realized there was a fence hidden under the out-of-bounds lines. Oh crap - I ran back to the other side where there were 5 flags waiting at the bottom of the right spur. I could see the different hilltops and knolls on the map but wasn't 100% sure which one was in the centre of the circle so I lost a minute checking flags here.

It was a tough call whether to go for the double black diamond Bullseye control in the southwest corner of the map, given that the finish was in the northeast corner of an 11X14 map and, oh yeah, I'm not a very fast runner. I knew I didn't have enough time for it but I really wanted to try a double black diamond control because they were so interesting. This one was a little hilltop most of the way up K2 that we had to find using contours only.

After that, it was a mad dash for the finish line - almost 5 km of hilly running in 37 minutes. I picked up one control south of the main trail on the way back but didn't dare pick up any more. If I'd paid attention closely enough to learn that the points deductions for late arrivals had been reduced below the already-low level of 10 points per minute, it would have been worth picking up more controls. [Edit: Hammer said this would be fixed.] The last part of the run was level 5 intensity, and I'm still feeling it now. With all my ultra training, I don't experience that very often! I made it to the finish line with 23 seconds to spare in the 2-hour time limit and managed to win masters women. Excellent job by Funderstorm, who came out in front, 680 pts to 670! When I left, she was sitting in 2nd place of 65 female racers - nice.

Great fun! Thanks to Anvil, Dana and Hammer, whom I think were the organizing team. Excellent idea to use the ski rating system. So nice to see so many friends. 'Bent, BGY and I had lunch at Domestique, where we chatted with DD11. Fun day out.

And then it got less fun. After my shower, I heard strange sounds coming from the living room. BazingaDog was upstairs, and Mocha never causes trouble so I flew down the stairs. The poor thing was having a grand mal seizure. I could only comfort her and wait and hope and cry. When she first got up, she was agitated and wouldn't stop pacing. She fell down a bunch of times but we weren't able to stop her from walking around. BazingaDog was terrified and refused to come back in the house after I put the two of them outside.

She is fine now. It's almost certainly cancer-related so I'm not sure how much investigation the vet will do. Instead, I read up on dog seizures this afternoon so we know how to help her in future. If it lasts longer than 2 minutes, she is at risk of overheating so we need to cool her down. If it lasts longer than 5 minutes, she needs to go to the vet immediately for anti-convulsants. Other than that, all we can do is prevent her from hurting herself and try to soothe her without touching her head. (She could accidentally bite.) Very scary and sad, especially since she was galloping around the yard 20 minutes earlier. :(((

And just like that, it feels like our extended fall colour season is nearly done. There are still some leaves left on trees but most of them are down, and wherever they are, they're getting dry and crunchy. We can't complain; this has been an extra-beautiful autumn.

I drove to Glen Haffy to see the beautiful deciduous forests there. I was also interested to check out a scheduled cadet orienteering event but I must have been too late in the day. I'd planned to run longer but it was seriously treacherous with ankle-deep leaves obscuring roots, rocks and erosion.



It was beautiful though.

Get Out There Mag has a nice idea for the 200 (!!) of us doing Peak-2-Peak tomorrow. A poppy would be a nice touch too.

One of the cool things about working with people who are new to something is that they bring new ideas - sometimes really good ones. The teacher I volunteered with yesterday had done a little Scout-style orienteering as a child but was new to the idea of navigation racing.

It has only been a few days since Star Tracks but she had already made up a little course at the school using QR codes where the kids would find them, then use their phones to check the QR code and get clues for finding the next one. Simple and brilliant!

I wonder if we could use QR codes to implement permanent O courses at a very low cost - just laminate little cards and attach them to trees. Ideally, we'd have an app that records the time of visit, which seems like it shouldn't be that hard to do, then it could be like Strava.

From the American College of Sports Medicine: a 7-minute circuit workout designed to reduce injury in ultrarunners.

30 seconds each, as many as you can or as long as you can, with no rest in between other than to change stations. Circuit may be repeated if time and fitness allow:

1. Jumping jacks
2. Wall sit
3. Push-up
4. Abdominal crunch
5. Step-up onto chair
6. Squat Lower body
7. Triceps dip on chair
8. Plank hold
9. High knees/running in place
10. Lunge
11. Push-up and rotation
12. Side plank

About 10% of Star Tracks MTBO racers and volunteers were teachers, including two newbie navigators, both of whom asked me to introduce some of their students to orienteering. The first session, with a colleague of Coach LD's at Humberview Secondary School in Bolton, was today. The next session is planned for November with a grade 12 physics teacher who thinks orienteering would fit well with her unit on magnetism. Cool!

Today's session with Miss Rice was easy to put together since it was at Albion Hills, and Mick generously offered to put my course into the mapping software. After an intro, we sent the students out in teams of two, except for one local mountain biker who was given permission by the teacher to race solo because he is in the park regularly.

It was a 12-control score-O where students needed to stay on trails. In addition to two orienteering maps, each team was given an Albion Hills Summer Trail Map with post numbers and trail names that they could use to relocate if they got lost. At least one team did. They also had my cell phone #. Out of about 10 teams, two of them phoned me - one to ask for directions and the other to let me know where they were when they were late.

The solo student got all 12 controls and returned in 50 minutes - fast! Most of the other teams got 4-8 controls, and about half of them returned after the deadline. The rest returned less than 5 minutes ahead of the deadline, which is better planning than most adults on a score-O course. There's such a wide range of abilities and enthusiasm at this age, although all these kids seemed to give it a reasonable shot.

Four kids just hiked random trails in the northeast part of Albion, hoping to see one of the four controls up there. No luck. When they returned after half an hour, I offered to orient them at a nearby trail junction. Suddenly, it made sense and they ran off right away to a control. When they ran back out, they were smiling and kicking themselves at how easy it should have been the first time.

The event winner didn't need to leave on the school bus because he lives nearby, and the teacher suggested that he might be willing to help pick up controls on his mountain bike. We divided them up but in the end, he was so keen and fast that I only made it to one of the controls before he did. So I sat in the sun and checked e-mail and waited for the flags to be returned. Quite a luxury!

As I was packing up the flags, it occurred to me that a volunteer probably isn't supposed to be alone with a student. It wouldn't have popped into my mind except that Coach LD had mentioned that I should get a criminal record check to be eligible for future youth volunteering, but it was OK this time because I wouldn't be alone with them. Also, a U.S. teacher friend of mine lost her job last month when a much larger student falsely accused her of physical assault. After a brief flicker of distress, I decided to just pretend it was the good old days when a teenager could chat for a few minutes with a lady older than his Mom after helping to take down some flags. Sad that we have to think about that stuff but I get it.

Hanging controls for the Humberview high school session. If we use the same course in future, allow about 90 minutes elapsed time. Time deducted for stops but time and distance added for control hanging on the east side, not recorded on my Ambit.

Picked up exactly one control out of twelve - the only one I got to first!

After mega-stress yesterday in my role as Orienteering Ontario prez, today I get to introduce some excited high school students to the thrill of running around in the woods with a map. If it weren't for the fun parts of volunteering, no one would ever do the rest of what needs to be done. Now let's just hope that high school students are fun...

Out-and-back on the Bruce Side Trail to Centreville Creek Rd. while listening to Danelle Ballengée's TA1 podcast. It's interesting to hear her perspective on safety, i.e. she is a little horrified as she looks back on some of the things she and other top racers did back in her EcoChallenge and Primal Quest days. I was *very* safety conscious as I listened, running at an easy pace with careful foot placement because the roots and rocks were hidden under fallen leaves.

This was a beautiful, cool sunset run - almost meditative... until the first gunshot. At that point, I ripped out my earphone, yelled "Hello" a couple of times and quickened my pace. Then came the second gunshot, really loud, then another one. Then I remembered the gun club on the same block of land. They usually only shoot on Wednesday evenings and weekends but maybe it was a special occasion or a wedding or something.

No Power Yoga class tonight because my bad shoulder was too bad. Ugh.

Nice editorial from the Globe: "After the Attack, we're still Canada"
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editor...

It would have been a spectacular autumn day for a run but the news reports made me feel sick to my stomach.

Oh, Canada... :(

For people outside of Canada, this happened inside our Parliament Buildings this morning. And that's not all, and it's not over yet. :(((

I'd planned to run to Glen Haffy and back before dinner but my shoulder was so painful that I just stayed here and did volunteer work. Gotta get that fixed. Blah.

On a more cheerful note, here's a new use for your old beer bottles.

I went out for a short trail run before dinner and suddenly a voice in my head asked whether I had re-assigned control pick-up for three controls after one of our volunteers had to head home to relieve his babysitter. There was so much going on that I may have handed his map quickly to someone else but I couldn't remember for sure.

So instead of a little toodle around Palgrave, I turned right and ran to Albion Hills to visit the three control sites in question. The controls were all gone, and two of the locations didn't have any flagging tape either, so it looks like one of us did it, and all is well. While I was there, I ran to a few other control locations to remove flagging tape that was still out. By the time I got back to Palgrave West, it was raining and so dark that I could barely see the trail. Any longer and I would have been running by iPhone flashlight.

The endless autumn leaf show continues to dazzle.

Don't mess with ultrarunners.
http://trailrunnermag.com/people/news/article/1515...