Training Log Archive: Tundra/Desert

Planned a grand tour de Izmailovskiy Park, but went home after only three of the four south-lunging loops. I'm pretty sure I used to be doing something quite close to this back in the early 1990s, maybe late 1980s. I didn't eat enough beforehand and was low on energy, that's why the wimpage-outage.

Climb is from the latest O-map of the park.

Somewhat happy with the first "running" week in ages... (as opposed to ultra/rogaining weeks). I will have to ramp it up to 9–12 hours/week pretty soon.

C • running week 2

Felt like a good day for a rest day. Can't ramp it up too fast, and last night the left hip hurt again, if only for a couple minutes.

One Big Loop. Wasn't overdressed this morning; there was frost on the ground. And a lot of exhaust. I should run earlier to escape the exhaust, like at 5 am, but I hate running early, my body doesn't really want to do it.

Ran from the apartment to near the start of Moscow Meridian. There were some people in Izmailovskiy Park but only on the Big Loop roads, none in the woods. Had to wait for a while crossing Enthusiastov.

The area at the corner of which the track ends is a police dog training center. Some of the puppies were being walked in the woods.

The closing, 24th stage of Moscow Meridian, score-O, an "almost" mass start, 19 controls, get all, at Terletskie Lakes. Kolya promised "the real forest night orienteering" this time, and it was so. I did a lot of 90-degree routes/hesitation standing at trail junctions in the beginning, sometimes past the trail junctions. I also messed up the sequence again. I didn't plan at all until close to Control 44, just going around the perimeter, and at 44 it seemed to me that I should get some of the inside controls, and so I went.

It does not look like a major difference from just looking at the map, but the 40–41 sequence was certainly best taken between 39 and 38. I was going way around the green on 40–45 and saw an unmapped, wide break and took it and it dumped me on the lake's thin ice, with third-green bushes all around me. I broke both through the ice (half knee-deep) and the bushes (lost major time while doing that). I also went clockwise while most people went counterclockwise; the only reason it would make a difference is because of the slightly non-coincident start/finish. Because I went opposite to the flow, I ended up winning a bunch of splits, but the opposite-direction splits are much better than mine.

I got the required 12 scores out of the 24 stages and ended up 20th, out of 600+, for the fall season. My score for this stage was the lowest of all of my scores for all of MosMeridian I did ever, no doubt because of all the standing and thinking, and the swim.

Ran back. I was dressed just right for this whole evening, a good choice of layers.

Score - Splits

I only ended up doing 6 pills out of the second batch of Prilosec, every other day, then once every few days, then ... and haven't had a feeling that I should probably down another pill soon. Maybe the whole thing is finally over.

Did absolutely nothing the whole day. Disgusted with myself. This unemployed situation isn't productive.

In early afternoon, ran The Big Loop at the park. It was pleasantly warm and I was overdressed. The weather was spectacular and slight breeze had scattered the exhaust. Paper-thin ice covered the lakes, and even at that time during a workday the park was full of walkers and strollers, most of them past retirement age.

I felt as usual after having rogained: powerful and slow.

Moscow Meridian in Ramenki. An open park, perfect sprint terrain. The usual night score-O, no pre-planning, starting with the rest of the people as soon as your turn comes to punch the start unit.

The highlight of the course was a playground castle with controls on two of its three levels (there were three blow-ups of the three levels). It wasn't really possible to figure things out from these blow-ups, so my impression was that most people just got there and poked around the castle trying to see the obvious passages. I approached it and of course there was a solid wall from my direction of approach, and I had to go halfway around to get in. Once I found the first-level control, I took the first stairs I saw to the second floor, and then stopped to read the map and found the second-floor control. It would have seemed to me that the faster way was to get the second-floor control first, given the available entrance and exit directions, but from looking at the splits I saw that most people did what I did, evidently figuring it out as they saw it.

I started just after Oleg and he caught up with me on the way to my first control because he chose to get another control first. So, from there I left the planning to him, opting to follow and see how far I'd get. It was not difficult to keep up, most likely because Oleg just came back from a week of skiing in Finland. On this particular route, however, I should have taken Control 40 after Control 49, leaving #47 to be had between Controls 38 and 49. That's where Oleg headed, to #40, but I let him go as I trotted off to #47. After I got the castle, I headed off to #38, trying to S-curve the remaining controls, but then discovered that I had already got #47, so the S-curve had a gap in it. I turned around and went to #32. My revised plan yielded a longish leg, 38–48, and I thought that the resulting route must have really sucked.

After the finish I could see that the route with 47 taken in proper order (looking like a Cyrillic YA) was indeed a good one. Another good route, I thought, was to start and end the same way but to take the central controls in a U (45–41–43–...–40–46–49).

When I saw the split analysis, it turned out that the best route was something quite different altogether. Only one person out of about 100 starters got it. The U route, at 18:08 Superman time and with 3 takers, was some 36 seconds slower than the best sequence at 17:32 Superman. The YA route, with 4 takers, was 18:13, and the one I ended up covering wasn't that bad at all, at 18:36 Supertime. I was the only one who opted for that particular sequence.

After staring at the HR/altitude record, it became clear that the true contour interval at the Ramenki map is about 3.5 meters.

Score - Splits

Don't know why I didn't run, but I didn't.

I was thinking going to a Sprint in Dolgoprudnyi, but I wasn't in a sprinty shape after the test run. Then I thought I'd go hashing and was about ready to go out the door, but couldn't take any more drinking after last night, and hashing just isn't fun without drinking. Then I thought about just a run in the park, but as always. So the day was spent sleeping.