Training Log Archive: abiperk

Grinding along on our handful of miles of gravel.

Event: DVOA Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education
 

A family effort at the Schuylkill Center for the first night of the DVOA weeknight summer sprint series. I had the map most of the time, Z ran about half of it, and everyone was pretty grumpy by the end.

Pro tip: getting dental work right after a race is a bad idea. Apparently post-race metabolism screws with your ability to process the anesthesia and you don't get numb enough. My dentist tells me this is an actual thing.

Boring basement recovery spin

Day 2 of OMM Iceland. We dozed fitfully throughout the night and were grateful for our expedition racing experience when we awoke at 5am the next morning, since we were operating on one night of sleep over the previous three. We had six hours on Day 2 and our start time was 5:56am, so we packed up our gear and tent, finalized our route, grabbed a handful of gorp, and set off.

We ran the road back east to get AR and then swept north, collecting two points along the way before entering the pocket of terrain in the center of the course, just north of midcamp, where there were 4 or 5 CPs, all requiring substantial elevation gain to retrieve. My right achilles was pinching for the first hour of the day, but otherwise we were both feeling good and moving quite well. It was one of those days where everything was flowing. Brent's nav was spot-on, we were making smart decisions on route choice and maximizing efficiency, moving cleanly over the technical terrain, fueling well, and just feeling really good.

The rain started about two hours in and the winds picked up through the day. It wasn't Itera weather, but it had its moments, and once again, we found ourselves grateful for being able to draw on past experience. At one point, my map blew out of my hand and clean up a mountain. I tried to scramble after it, but there was no way I could catch it. We grabbed the point on the summit and descended the other side, and found my map sitting peaceful on the slope.

We moved through our planned route cleanly, criss-crossing with several teams throughout the day. As we got closer to the end, we thought about adding one additional CP, a couple kilometers north of the finish, but we knew time would be tight and decided it wasn't worth the risk. We finished with about 25 minutes left on the clock, took advantage of the break in the weather to change our clothes and lay out some of our wet gear, and then went into the host restaurant for bread and soup.

We joined Pete and Shari and ended up sitting with Nick Barrable and Tom Fellbaum, the overall winners of the event (and super modest, for all of their accomplishments), and enjoyed playing Orienteering Geography, as they knew several members of the DVOA club and a few UK adventure racers.

We finished with 270 points on Day 2, good for 12th place overall (of about 60 teams?) and 1st among the coed teams. Following the awards, we headed over to the famed Blue Lagoon for an afternoon of recovery in the thermal pools and trading stories with other OMMers (including two women who'd race at Itera last summer!).

Truly, a wonderful weekend and a fantastic event. We'd both love to get back for another OMM and test out some of the trade secrets we picked up on lessening our load. By the time we got home, Brent had already figured out how to half our base weight with minimal new gear purchases :)

C • Sounds 2

C • race report 2

Event: OMM Iceland
 

Brent's Race Report from OMM - Iceland: https://rootstockracing.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/l...

Day 1 of OMM Iceland. The race began with a relatively leisurely morning. We had to catch a bus at 7:45am, and maps given out at the start line. They started teams every two minutes, and we were somewhere in the middle of the field with an 8:47am start.

This was a score-o version of the OMM, rather than a point-to-point course. There were, I believe, 32 CPs on the map - the six furthest to the east were restricted to Saturday, and the rest could be collected at any time. There were minimal directions and no printed instructions, so we mostly relied on common sense and typical AR and rogaine procedures. The field was largely made up of orienteers and fell runners from the UK, with a handful of teams from continental Europe, a couple from Japan, at least one Canadian woman, and two other Americans, Pete Spagnoli and Shari Hymes.

Given the gear list, we essentially treated the race like a foot section of an expedition race. We were carrying our ARWS regulation sleeping bags, our Big Agnes ultralight tent (good for a team of four during an AR, overkill for the two of us, but still only 3 pounds), an MSR pocket rocket and titanium stove set, extra clothes, etc... We also added a ground pad, knowing that Icelandic nights can be pretty chilly and wet, and since we would only be racing for seven hours, we each included a book as well, reasoning that there was a good chance that it would be rainy and we'd be stuck in our tent for hours before we were ready to go to sleep (spoiler alert - we never opened them). Since we were looking at the weekend as more of a fun anniversary adventure and good training for Worlds than anything else, we weren't super concerned with weight -- but we also didn't appreciate just how serious many of the experienced OMMers take Ultralight until we saw that most of the packs ranged from 8L to 20L (compared to our 40L Ospreys).

At 8:47 on the dot, we crossed the line and each received a large, laminated map. The maps were really sparse, with very few features and 20 meter contours that left a whole lot to the imagination. We spent just a couple minutes looking at the CPs and came up with a rough route for Day 1. Knowing that we weren't going to be able to clear it but wanting to give ourselves the best chance for maximizing our score on Day 2, we swept north and east, running several kilometers along a gravel road for the first CP and then traveling overland for the next few. We noticed that many folks were sticking to trails instead of venturing into the lava fields, but overall we were able to move well over the terrain, from a physical perspective. With so little detail on the maps, though, we worked our way slowly, trying to keep track of what we were seeing on the ground as fog quickly enveloped the landscape. The mapped "trails," we discovered, were really more suggested routes than anything else, marked with orange stakes dozens of meters apart, which were really tough to pick out in the conditions.

We made it to our second checkpoint, AK, on the edge of a lake, then crossed the road for a small cluster of points to the east. We struggled on one marked as on a creek but which was actually in a dry bed half a kilometer north of the actual water course (not necessarily a bad plot, just a confusing clue), and then ventured north to a point on a hilltop overlook a large lake (which was beautiful as we were climbing up but covered in fog by the time we reached the summit).

By that point, we had already decided that we wouldn't be able to continue around the lake on our intended route. Instead, we crossed back over the road and aimed for a saddle along a steep rocky ridgeline 150m or so above us. After a fun climb/scramble up lava rock, we more-or-less hit the saddle, but found ourselves cliffed out on the other side. We needed to descend and head W/NW to our next destination (AH, I think?), but in order to get down, we veered south and inadvertently continued in that direction. The terrain was lining up for awhile, but we knew we should have crossed a road, and then a couple "trails," and we didn't see any of that. Before long, things sort of stopped making sense.

At that point, we had less than 2 hours to the cut-off and were nearly 20 kilometers from midcamp, so we found a "trail" heading south and jumped on it. Within a few minutes, we found ourselves looking at a checkpoint on the edge of a small lake. Could it be that we were in the right place all along, we wondered? Maybe to the point just south of where we wanted to be, AG?

Nope, turns out we'd wandered all the way back to AK -- our second CP -- several kilometers from where we thought we were. Kicking ourselves a bit, we ran back along the trail that would lead us to mid-camp, still way further away than we wanted it to be.

There were two CPs that we could collect along the way, totaling 30 points, and we figured that in total, it would be about five minutes of work to get them. We knew that we were going to be late anyway, and the penalty was 2 points per minute, so we reasoned that we could build ourselves a 20-point insurance policy by collecting them. We hit them both smoothly and ended up running in with several other teams, all of whom were in the penalty zone by that point.

We ended up with 240 points for Day 1 but 22 minutes late, so a 44-point penalty, or 196 total points, putting us in the bottom third of the field. We were a little bit demoralized, but since we had a better grasp of the maps and terrain at that point and were both feeling really good physically, we were confident that we could have a better Day 2.

We set up our tent, enjoyed some hot chocolate from Pete and Shari and a romantic rehydrated anniversary dinner, and spent the rest of the evening chatting with other racers and wandering along the beach. The weather was perfect - no rain until the overnight hours.

At 9pm it still looked like midday, but we knew we should get some sleep, so we crawled into our tent, spent an hour planning our route for the next day, and tried to fall asleep -- "tried" being the operative word. Turns out that multiday racing in 24 hours of daytime is incredible. Stage racing, though? Not so much :)

Arrived in Iceland at 5am (1am EST) and spent the day along the Golden Circle. Three hours of sleep in the last 36, ten hours of driving and hiking to pretty waterfalls, and one hard fall on volcanic rock. Perfect way to get ready for a race :)

C • But Iceland!! 2