Training Archive: MWIn the 7 days ending 2007-02-17:
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| S | M | T | W | H | F | S | |||||||
Saturday Feb 17 | ||
| orienteering race 1:44:09 [3]*** 9.5 km (10:58 / km) +460m 8:50 / km | |
| 21c | ||
| Sweetwater Creek State Park, GA, on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Long and slow and in full control, comme j'aime bien. Gully spur stuff like I started on in Canberra. I felt like Brer Rabbit in the Briar Patch - this stuff is so easy. Good flow going throughout, although by the end I was getting pretty tired. I didn't push at the end, cos I want to keep a little in the tank for tomorrow. This is just training, after all, not the main event. I got off line a couple of times, but had no trouble with any of the controls. There was one exception, where my control was in a reentrant, and I was right on line for it, and then I saw another control about 60 meters higher up the same reentrant. So I ran to that, it had the wrong code, and then looked down the reentrant, and saw my control. Two controls on the same feature shouldn't be that close. I took a good tumble coming in to one gully. I started to fall, tried to accelerate out of it, and just made things worse. Did a downhill face plant, and simultaneously hit my knee. It took me a while to get going after that, although there's no serious damage. Had Charlie No. 2 by the Whitlams in my head as I ran. Afterwards, I skipped the sprint, and visited Stone Mountain. Gotta like a city that has Waffle Houses on every corner, and where blacks and whites actually get along together - unlike the de facto segregation that still operates in DC. | ||
| Note | |
| Week 1 target of 4 hours achieved. | ||
Blue - Splits | ||
Friday Feb 16 | ||
| running 25:00 [2]4.3 km (5:49 / km) | |
| Henderson, North Carolina. A morning plod beside a decaying highway on the outskirts of what might have been a sleepy town, if I had actually ventured in to see. So this is why birds fly south in the northern hemisphere. No snow round here. Theres distance between the buildings, and somebody was mowing a lawn. Big dogs roamed freely and barked menacingly. I could feel the draw of the highway, wanting me to keep running. But with two long runs coming up, I wanted to save my calf.
Atlanta looked good all lit up at night as I arrived. Like the Emerald City, although the I-85 was no yellow brick road. | ||
Thursday Feb 15 | ||
| Note | |
| Cruising down the highway at night, listening to Archive and Nick Caves murder ballads. The map is full of possibilities, to keep driving all night and visit place names only known from movies, and perhaps the occasional constitutional law case from my youth. | ||
Wednesday Feb 14 | ||
| Note | |
| You know you are an orienteer when ... you can remember your SportIdent number, but not your own phone number. I gave the wrong number to the garage. They were trying to call me, because they wanted to go home early because of the snow.
What are the odds that I would have to clear snow off my car on a weekday morning? I think that's the second time in 12 months I've driven during the working week. And it's the second time this month I've got my phone number wrong. | ||
| running 20:00 [2]3.5 km (5:43 / km) | |
| Heading out for my run at 11 pm, Fox News tried to entice me to stay in the warmth of my living room with an upcoming Valentine's story on "How to French Kiss". But I figured that having gone out with a real live French babe for four years, I could skip the Americanized version. Shouldn't they be freedom kisses on Fox?
Once out there, I had the initial feeling that it was a five layer night, and I was only wearing four. But the footing was OK, and things soon warmed up. Saturday's run should be at least 95 minutes, so I think I'm still on target for four hours this week. It would be a shame to fall short the first week of having set some targets. But the left calf problem I was having in November is still clearly there. So I need to be careful. | ||
Tuesday Feb 13 | ||
| running 20:00 [2]3.5 km (5:43 / km) | |
| My calves are sore, it's sleeting, and I should get a long run in on Saturday. So just 20 minutes today.
I have the car booked in for a service tomorrow. I hope the roads aren't too icy to get there. | ||
Monday Feb 12 | ||
| Note | |
| OK. 20 weeks until Finland. Here's the plan. 4 weeks of speed work at the end, and 4 weeks of hill work prior to that, leaving me with 12 weeks to build some base, February to April.
The challenge is not to get injured or sick along the way. So I don't want to be too ambitious for time/distance in the base building. Looking back over my running since August, I see I have only managed more than 4 hours in a week on 5 occasions. That's pretty poor, but it's where I'm coming from. So I'm going to aim for: Weeks 1-2: minimum 4 hours, of which one run of at least one hour Weeks 3-4: minimum 4.5 hours, of which one run of at least one hour Weeks 5-8: minimum 5 hours, of which one run of at least 75 minutes Weeks 9-10: minimum 5.5 hours, of which one run of at least 90 minutes Weeks 11-12: as above, but with at least one hills session in the week. All of this is to be run at an easy pace. This won't be enough to get me into the A-final, but it should be enough to enjoy a 3 week orienteering holiday without being in too much pain. And if I can follow it through, then it will serve me well for the following year. As for technical training, there's not much I can do. In France I relied on regular races on challenging maps. Not much risk of that round here. The first five days in Finland will be a shock to the system. | ||
| C • Technical training 2 | ||
| running 30:00 [2]5.3 km (5:40 / km) | |
| Washington Monument - 10.45 pm
Dinner of paprika potato wedges with aioli. Pretty warm out, with 4 layers on. Once when I was in Pakistan someone told me of some paragliders he had met in India. They would go up a mountain and jump off, and then cycle up into the clouds. I think it was cumulo-nimbus clouds that were especially dangerous, because they will suck you in, and spit you out hours later as a dead ice-block. In any case, it got pretty cold up there, so they had to wear lots of clothes. And then they would descend to the hot Indian plains, landing in a village as quasi-gods. All the villagers would come out to inspect the spectacle, wanting to touch. Meanwhile, the dudes were frantic to get their clothes off because it's so hot. That's what it feels like when I get back to my apartment from running with all these clothes on. I have to tear all the layers off as fast as possible. | ||
Sunday Feb 11 | ||
| orienteering race 31:39 [3]*** 4.8 km (6:36 / km) | |
| 13c | ||
| Lake Fairfax - Long Sprint
7th place. 4'21'' off Ted's third place, with two execution errors (#6, #10) costing 50'' and 44'' respectively, and a route choice error (#9) (the track was faster than the straight line). I was pushing for the first half, but then the pace dropped off noticeably, and I was having trouble with the pace by the end. It's a worry, when I can't sustain the pace over 5 km. But most worrying were the two execution errors. Lapses of concentration immediately before a change of direction were the cause. And I guess they could have been corrected by having better plans as I left the previous control. But also, in both cases I found the terrain mid-way confusing as things didn't quite match up with what I was expecting. | ||
| C • Quantas ad 2 | ||
| orienteering race 20:13 [3]*** 3.3 km (6:08 / km) | |
| 13c | ||
| Medium sprint
6th place. 33 seconds between me and Ted's second place. I got up to 3rd place mid-way through, but then gradually dropped down the ladder. WinSplits says I didn't make any mistakes, but looking again at the map, that's nothing to be proud of. It was a very very easy course. So it's just down to leg speed, which doesn't worry me at all at this stage. I do feel like a slug, but that's age, which affects us all differently, plus my poor health over the last couple of years. The important thing is not to make mistakes in the navigation. | ||
| orienteering race 15:44 [2]*** 2.5 km (6:18 / km) | |
| 13c | ||
| Short sprint
Lovely day. At 2C the day seemed warm after the recent weather. Heading out of DC the Potomac was frozen in action, and looking lovely. Don't see that in Australia. Despite my misgivings about sprints, I enjoyed these runs. It felt good to have some flow going, even if the reason was that the navigation was incredibly easy. And afterwards, there was warmth and pizza and people to chat to. Could almost think I was in France, except there it would have been a boeuf bourgignon and red wine. All very nice. | ||
| C • Sauna next time? 2 | ||
Sprint: Long - Splits | ||
Sprint Short - Splits | ||
Sprint: Medium - Splits | ||