Training Log Archive: lackofluke

I've been doing quite a lot of 7.5km runs, and since I felt reasonably good as I set out, I thought it might be a good idea to go for a slightly longer run than usual. And so I did.

Up to the Cumnor Hurst trigpoint and back. Not a particularly great time, since I ran fairly slowly.

Unusually short session this time, 50s on 10s off for one complete circuit only. Didn't seem to have as many breathlessness issues this time, perhaps something to do with the weekend's orienteering activities?

British Relay Orienteering Championships 2006, Great Common. Running first leg on Men's Premier Relay. Mostly supposedly runnable forest with several patches of green and a few small areas of complex contour detail.

The relay championships used the Great Common area, which only the longer individual courses got to. I have to admit I wasn't a particular fan of this forest. I found it hard going, there were a lot of low-lying branches, not brashings as such but branches on the trees getting in the way. It got better towards the end.

As I said above I was on first leg, and since I was running Men's Premier, there were a lot of elites with me (Ed Nicholas, Graham Gristwood, Neil Northrop amongst others). I perhaps ran a bit too hard towards the first control and tired myself out a little. I lost the pack at about number 3, but to be honest I was never going to keep up with the elites.

The biggest mistake I made was with #4. It was a silly mistake, I ended up running past the path I thought I wanted and on a parallel path. However, the former path would have been better. I then had to go through a block of forest marked as white, but which I found very slow-going as I was always pushing branches out the way or having to change direction slightly to avoid all the crap. I found a parallel clearing with no control in it. I forced myself to relocate off a path junction to the south. It took me 9 minutes for that 460m leg.

As I left #4, I expected to see the path pass a distinct vegetation boundary between medium green and white forest. Could I pick it out? No. I ended up running round paths instead. Besides, the forest looked about as runnable as the block I passed through on the way to #4. Nonetheless the control was easily visible from the path 'behind' it.

Number 6 I seem to have messed up as well. I'm not sure how I missed the obvious almost-North-South path in front of the control and ended messing around in contour features on the wrong side of another path. A relocation took me up to an obvious wall-path crossing about 100m north.

I lost a little time at number 12, which happened to be the spectator control, since I didn't realise a path had stopped, and that the control was on the edge of the forest. 14 was in a heavily brashed section of the forest, it wasn't fun to pick your way through that lot. However, most of the rest of the course wasn't too tricky. There were a lot of controls (24 in 5.4km) so they came at you quite quickly.

I can perhaps attribute some of my mistakes to not having a good night's sleep at all. My body is such a snob when it comes to sleep - if it's not comfortable enough then there really isn't much chance of me getting a great deal of sleep. Perhaps this was behind some of my silly mistakes? Nonetheless, I didn't seem to be suffering the effects of sleep deprivation today - it's about 11pm as I write this and I'm still reasonably alert.

I'm not uploading splits for this event since the relay courses were extensively gaffled - me and distracted compared our courses and found that we had very few common controls. This extensive gaffling seems to have caught out Sheffield University's first leg runner, who mispunched. We can then say that, despite me not having a great run, OUOC's Men's Premier team beat ShUOC's!