Training Log Archive: BigWillyStyle

For anyone interested, here are the notes from the group brainstorming portion of CascadeOC's annual meeting this past weekend. Mostly club-specific stuff but also plenty of good generally applicable ideas and thinking. One thing I really like is the idea of a designated, welcoming, newcomer-friendly "debriefing" tent/area where experienced orienteers (and ideally the course designer) would be available for post-course discussion/teaching/encouragement. And food should be there too, obviously.

C • HW 13

Mercer Island loop, clockwise. Forgot watch. A little after starting I caught up to a guy and acquired a shadow for a few miles until he fell off about halfway around; he was apologetic about being unable to take a turn in front. A few minutes after I had got back to my car he happened to ride by and said thanks. It's fun when you form random fleeting cycling alliances.

Event: Choose Your Adventure Series: Corn Maze!
 

CYA Corn Maze. Jogged the course slowly, which allowed me to be abnormally efficient. My goal was to be always moving, and in the right direction. Mostly succeeded but did make two small mistakes - one ~15s, one ~10s. It's interesting how Corn Maze O distorts the relative importance of regular O skills - i.e. speed is highly devalued, while maintaining map contact and making quick, accurate decisions are greatly increased in value.

Sorry to miss the BC Champs at Whistler this weekend, as I had been looking forward to another crack at the Black Magic map which rekt me pretty hard in two years ago.

After eating some lunch, went on a journey to discover the tightest possible cycling loop around Lord Hill Park.

Event: Choose Your Adventure Series: City Park!
 

Event: BCOC
 

Last Mariners game of the season - one of the more epic baseball games I've seen in my time. Going in we knew we just needed to win tonight to go into the last game of the season tomorrow with a chance at a wildcard spot. Mariners go up 2-0 early, fall behind 5-2 in the 4th, rally to 5-4 in the 5th, go down 7-4 in the top 7th, rally to 7-7 in the bottom 7th, go down 8-7 in the top 8th after our pitcher chucks the ball into right field on a routine toss to first, but rally AGAIN to tie it at 8-8 in the bottom of the 8th. We then leave the bases loaded in the 8th with the chance to take the lead, leave the bases loaded in the 9th with a chance to walk off, go down 9-8 in the top 10th, get our leadoff man to second with no outs in the bottom 10th with our three best hitters up - Cano, Cruz, and Seager - who promptly go groundout, groundout, popup, which leaves the tying run at third, ends the game, and eliminates us from the playoffs all at once. Brrrrutal. #Marinersbaseball

http://www.fangraphs.com/livewins.aspx?date=2016-1...

C • M's 2

I enjoy the solitude of slicing noiselessly through the urban jungle at night. At a stoplight some girl in the car next to me yelled "Love your big pink backpack, handsome! You're the best!"

C • Sequel? 4

As far as I can tell I'm the only person to attend Vancouver Sprint Camp, Boston Sprint Camp, and SART, so I'm retroactively self-styling myself Champion of the 2016 North American Sprint Series :)

C • psssst..... 10

I was trying to enter my RG for the NAOC Long today; I say "trying" because as I went along I realized I haven't the slightest recollection of how I came to arrive at the fourth control. The splits show that it was not one of my better legs, but that I did arrive there in reasonably decent order. Guess I'll just put a straight line from 3 to 4? Bizarre. This perhaps reflects the exceptionally heavy mental taxation of that course - or the fact that it's been a week and my memory sucks.

C • Routegadget 2

Knee is getting better, but is still painful to the touch and when flexed or applied pressure on. Some bruising visible around the scabbed area. Seems to be a deep bone bruise on the outside of the kneecap.

Forgot watch.

Random thoughts from the last week:

It was a lot of fun to cruise around with Greg and Juanma during the interim week between Classic Champs and NAOC. I enjoyed hanging with those guys, and the chance to dust off my very limited Spanish, plus I learned a prodigious amount of less-than-polite Spanish words and phrases.

We stayed, consecutively, at two different hotels which had by far the worst two sorry excuses for a continental breakfast I've ever seen. At one place they literally had only coffee and tea. The other place had Nature Valley granola bars, so naturally we stole as many of those as we could and tried to feed them to each other for the rest of the week.

For the first time in a long time I don't currently have any plane tickets booked for orienteering trips. There was a point in April or May when I had five or six. Just this summer, I've orienteered in Massachusetts (twice), Connecticut, Wyoming, Alberta, Sweden, New York, and New Hampshire. How lucky am I to have these opportunities and experiences?

It's awesome that TG came to NAOC, but also unfortunate that his presence had such influence on the outcome of the forest races. This is definitely no fault of TG's or of the other guys' (their wins were well-deserved, plus major credit for being able to match that pace) and we all would do the same thing - if we could :) - but it was clearly a pretty egregious and unnecessary luck factor which compromised the fairness of the competitions. For example, it could just have easily happened that two Americans or two Canadians, rather than one of each, were helped by TG. Theoretically maybe that swings the BK Cup one way or the other, and voilà, someone on the losing side would be screaming bloody murder right about now and instead of talking about how great NAOC was, there'd be a huge no-fun crapstorm. I'd say we dodged a bullet there. Seems obvious that non-North Americans should start ahead of the red group of NA competitors, WRE rules be damned.

Consider this. The top map has a 9.9 km course, the bottom map a 13.7 km course. Top map is approximately three times bigger. Go figure.

I'm always a little sad when a fun orienteering weekend ends, and NAOC is the best of all orienteering weekends. If WOC is high school, NAOC is a really great house party; all your friends are there, no one does anything dumb and the neighbors don't call the cops.

C • Continental breakfast 7