| Might as well recycle what I just wrote to BorisGr:
"I just ran the Sage Stomp races in Kamloops, BC this weekend. I think I'm generally in pretty good shape right now, but I've been working way too much and ramping up my intervals at the same time, and so I came in to the races physically and mentally fatigued, emotionally drained, and sleep deprived. Needless to say, I didn't race well. Actually, my sprint was technically okay but just slow, until I made a 1 minute miss/overshoot/relocation on a 25 second leg a minute or two from the finish. Thomas Nipen beat me by nearly three minutes.
The [chase started] middle started okay, with me closing maybe half the 47 second gap on Brian May and getting to within sight of Magnus Johansson, who had started about a minute further ahead. Then my legs started to tank, and I got into a technical piece of forest, where the map was a bit weak [just where I happened to go--generally, it was decent], and I made two stopping-short parallel errors in a row for 2.5 minutes loss each. I jogged the rest of the course, so that I could focus on hitting the controls, and I was pleased that this worked. I finished in 46 minutes, about 8 minutes down on Thomas' winning time.
After a good night's sleep, I felt better physically and was eager and in a good mood going into Sunday's long distance race. A rain shower came just before I started and provided a nice break from the warm weather. I started the course by over-climbing and missing #1 by about a minute, coming to a location a but higher that looked almost exactly like the control location on the map. The map was made in 1988 and was up to the standards of its day, meaning that there is a lot of detail that seemed to be missing or under-mapped. I brushed this mistake aside and went on okay, before having to relocate a couple times on #4, losing maybe 4 minutes. I stopped really short on #10 and started looking around and cursing the map for not matching, having mentally teleported myself 400m ahead of where I was. I never really felt smooth after that, and I got pretty tired but avoided further major errors, until the end, when I started going from #16 to #18; both #16 and #17 were depressions, which probably facilitated the brain fart. I then got lost a few times running through open areas on the way to the last control. I ended up finishing in 1:52 for 13.2 km, 16 minutes down on Thomas Nipen and three minutes behind Brian May, who must have had some problems, too. Not my best work. The funny thing is that I was trying pretty hard but simply didn't have the mental capacity to do it right. I think all the cortisol from work stress is melting my brain, or something. |
| I ran fairly hard once up the main Ravenna ravine trail (3:40 for 1040m +21m), from where it leaves the field at the bottom to the new evergreen tree on the North side of the trail, just before it climbs more steeply into the grassy area at the top. I jogged back to the East end of the park and ran one of the 907m up-down-up-down hill intervals (+28m) in 3:11, which is a bit faster than I ran last July. My legs felt tired and sluggish today, I guess from all the biking and tromping up and down hills doing BEAST fieldwork.
I didn't wear my HRM transmitter strap, but I measured my pulse on my wrist starting five seconds after the second interval and got 174. Usually it goes down pretty fast, so it was probably around 180. My one minute recovery HR was 126. |
