Training Log Archive: bensmith

"Survival of the Fittest" in Squamish. I started off fairly fast, and enjoyed the undulating hills of the first half. The second half was one big up, and one big down. I struggled on the up, but there were some sweet sweet views to distract from the pain. I'd initially thought I'd crush the final descent, but nope! The trails were a bit too technical for my tired legs, so I was doing 8min/km on a descent! Last little bit was on a road, where I actually picked up some speed again.

This was my first Coast Mountain Trail Series race, which is organised by Gary Robbins and team. Man, do they know how to put on an event! In no particular order:
* Really well-marked course. Thousands of pin flags out there.
* Gary greets every finisher at the finish line. Hi fives and hugs all round.
* Free massage from Langara RMT students (not at every race, but most). It felt so good! And got some good pointers on more things to roll.
* Fun ways to give out draw prizes. The smaller items were given out by answering trivia questions about BC (e.g. where is the world's largest hockey stick (Duncan), what's the highest waterfall in Canada (Della Falls) etc). The biggest prizes were given away by: a) getting everyone to line up 10m from a box and take their shoes off; b) throwing the shoes towards the box; c) the closest 15 got to round 2, which involved running to a pile of potato sacks, sack-racing to a chair, running back to the pile of shoes, putting on shoes, and running to the swag table; d) first 10 people to the table get the good prizes. I came in 11th in the shoe toss (so qualified) and 9th in the sack race (so got a prize). Now I have to decide who gets to drink my growler of beer!

I need to focus on road running and orienteering mapping for a while, so this is probably going to be my longest run of the year. Very happy with my choice!

C • PussNBootsEyes 1

TRIUMF yoga

World Orienteering Day at Queen Elizabeth Park. Just did Loop 5, which was a lot of fun. Should have read ahead a bit more than I did.

11min warmup
8min, 8min, 11min with 1min rest at half marathon pace
11min cooldown

The rest of the group were doing a pyramid at 10k pace, but stopping every few minutes didn't seem like the best workout for me today. Legs felt strong. WOD tomorrow, then time to taper for Saturday.

C • Survival 3

Warm up jog to the start.

Long at McQueen Lake.

I was happy with my navigation in the most part. Made a parallel error on the way to 1, but identified it while I was only a little way down. Happy that I chose the "contour through the forest" option rather than "run along the road" for the long leg - it worked out well and was good practice.

Lowlight was spending 10 minutes looking for my compass, after I put it down to tie my shoelace and forgot to pick it up. Found it eventually, but felt very dumb.

Overall, this was a really fun weekend. It's great when everyone gets to stay together, and I chatted with a bunch of people I haven't talked to much before. I was pleasantly reassured by the training exercises, and learned a few useful tips. Thanks SAGE!

Course 8 - Splits

Catching features in rugged forest. Our training group treated some of it as a route choice exercise too, with us starting off at the same time, and me always arriving at the control last (I'm really very slow through undergrowth and felled trees), Nav was good.

Back to the lodge.

Corridor in forest. We ended up doing this as a group, which was fun.

Probably not the most useful exercise for me, as I often slow down and read the map in detail. I need to focus more on simplifying and running to catching features.

Contours-only map. I was pretty spent by now, and contours were tough to match up with the land (the vegetation boundaires really helps solidify some of the vagaries of the map).

Grassland sprint on Bunker Bench near Kamloops.

This was a REALLY fun map to run on - definitely the highlight of the weekend. My legs weren't really in the mood to go any faster, but the navigation was solid. I do a lot better in grasslands than in forest!