Training Log Archive: Mark3

Found out that one of my friends from the club died in a traffic accident this morning. This is the first time a friend has died. I am sad.
Run was very nearly cancelled but we decided he wouldn't have wanted that. He was only 30 and had an 8 month old baby. Managed to forget about it a bit during the run, but not really.

C • Tragic 1

Getting a bit muddy for trail shoes now. Bit chilly on the tops too, but ok when moving.

Put in some effort on the climbs, otherwise easy.
Light drizzle which would've been nice in the summer but it's distracting at night due to the torchlight.
Wore an unnecehat - still warm.

Annoyed - got stuck in those pointless roadworks where there is a really short section of temporary traffic lights but with nothing actually happening in between them - and so missed the group leaving by about a minute. So went for a dull one on my own :(

https://www.webscorer.com/racedetails?raceid=15704...
14th/191

Twisted R ankle a bit yesterday, but felt no worse this morning so did some precautionary icing over breakfast and decided it would be alright, which it was.
Would've been ok in trail shoes as it was so dry. In fact it was actually really warm and I was overdressed in 3/4s and ls.but it's literally 10 degrees colder on the west of the pennines! Lesson - always take options.
Much of the first couple of km were narrow accents with a multitude of gates and things, tried hard to get to near the front but after about 20m of sprinting my body decided it wasn't having that.but still ended up sufficiently close such that didn't have to queue for the gates-there was a lot of that further back.
Bit of everything on the course, mainly trail with some road and a very small amount of fell.great views down to carsington reservoir from the top. The top, though, was definitely not the last hill - Undulator is a good description.
Overtaking throughout which was nice; felt ok on anything other than the uphills. There were a couple of other hardcore runners there who also did the relays yesterday.

http://www.sportident.co.uk/results/2018/BritishFe...

First time doing the fell relays after getting injured on LiaD the week before last year. Was pretty worried about doing Langdale last week this year in case the same thing happened again!
Driving into the Lakes we could see the clag was pretty low (the forecast had said 650m, it was about 100m) which I thought would play to my strengths (well - Alistair's strengths at least). Nice to have one massive marquee with everyone in it - it was cosy, but sociable. Our first leg runner came back in 100th place, probably about where we expected time-wise. We'd expected about 90mins for leg 2 but they came back after 79, 70th for the leg, and Ali and I were only just ready for them.

I had told him in advance I was just going to defer to all his decisions and this happened immediately on the way to CP1; I voted for path and he wanted stream; we went stream. After 100m as we got into a bit of a queue on the narrow brackeny trod, I had the secretly-gratifying feeling of him saying 'I'm already regretting this'.
Good leg to CP2, we were 23rd on this leg, coming out lower than we expected just before the tarn but then coming out exactly where expected on the ridge in order to be able to follow the stream down in the clag. Lots of teams were messing about a lot here, if you lost contact you were pretty screwed since everything was white. The massive black dots in the centre of the control circles confused me since I assumed they were rocks or something, but no, just telling stupid people where the centre of a circle is. And obscuring quite a lot of other details.
Contoured and then path to CP3, straightforward although the straighter line looks faster retrospectively.
Then an insanely steep climb (2.0 Bl I reckon; it really was that bad, the contours are practically touching) and then we elected to go N of the OOB to give us the least rocky descent. 43rd on the leg, I think the lucky teams who went the rocky way on the map were faster, but it was definitely a gamble based on the map, the unlucky teams are probably still out there.
Going into the control I twisted my ankle, not badly, but enough to be annoying. Also noticed my shoelace was undone which lost us 45s (more haste less speed!!) and gave us a lowly 78th on the leg, 45s faster we'd have been 20th or something. 31st on the run-in leg.

Overall 33rd on the nav leg, which I think is damn good.
http://www.sportident.co.uk/results/2018/BritishFe...
Very respectable time compared to the other orienteers on the course, and very probably the only time I'm ever going to beat Dan Haworth (gotta feel sorry for Keswick - their leg positions were 1st, 1st, 71st, 1st).

Macc were 61st overall; 100th, 70th, 33rd, 129th
(our last leg is a great road runner - not prepared for leg 4's mental descent. If Robbie hadn't gone to uni and was running for us, we'd have come 40th. But I digress - I think that's one of Macc's best performances for a while - and we were significantly ahead of our V40, V50 and women's teams, which was obviously the main thing.

A good day. The ladies team had all made cake, and brought enough for about 2 whole cakes per person - this meant I had about 7 (ish, I lost count, could've been more) cakes followed by a burger. Felt dreadful for several hours afterwards and then got no sleep as my body desperately tried and failed to deal with the sugar. In future will set a cake limit of 2. Well... maybe 3.

Feeling alright after yesterday's rest.
Cold is no worse and not bad enough for 'ill'. Yet.