Training Log Archive: jjcote

COC Long Distance Champs, Eb's Trails. Same stuff, more tornado damage in places, quite hot (as was yesterday, but at least that was short), and some stuff in more open (but not really that much less thick) terrain. One leg was really nice. This was a battle of attrition, and I stuck it out. One way or another, I finished in ninth place, and was the top American (considering Hawkins to be Australian), as well as being 5 years older than anyone who beat me (and 10 or more years older than all but Duca). Not an excellent performance on my part by any means, and a lot of the time lost was actually poor route choices. The crux of this race was keeping your head on straight after going through the spectator leg, when heading out into the sunnier, hotter southern area with maybe the technically toughest navigation. My brain was teetering on the edge of not being able to think at all, and there were several times when I just headed for the shade of a tree and kneeled down for a few seconds to look at the map and make sure that what I was doing made sense. I held it together well enough.

A few people commented on the discussion board that they would be interested in going back to this area, though preferably in the spring or fall. I would not. Life is too short, and there are too many other entertaining ways to spend my time. Maybe if a raging fire came through and wiped out all of the vegetation. I prefer orienteering in places that don't require fighting through so many branches and leaves, and there are plenty of such places.

While paying at the cashier's counter for dinner, one of the waiters saw the map in my hand and asked if we had been orienteering. Why, yes! He knew about it, and was interested and knowledgeable enough to ask about my route choice to #8. Turns out that he ran at the APOC events in Alberta five years ago, when he was a teenager. And he was astounded when he heard that we were from Massachusetts. "You mean they do orienteering in other places? I thought it was just a Canadian thing!". Not at all what I expected to hear from a guy in Saskatoon!

10 - Splits

COC Middle Distance Champs, Eb's Trails. This may be the first time I've used the "Intense!" technical intensity designator. The 9 controls I have listed as spikes are a little different than what that would mean in other terrain, since they were typically taken very slowly and not necessarily very straight. The topography here was excellent, like the best of the VWC97 stuff at Camp Ripley, or better. I can't say the same for the vegetation, however. It was more like the 1994 US Champs in Anchorage. Very thick, both in terms of visibility and the ability to go in the desired direction. And there was something growing here and there that reminded me of devil's club; I didn't stop to make a definitive identification, but I have that barberry-like thorns-in-the-knees issue, and at one point I came up with a very painful handful of tiny spikes. White woods was pretty thick, light green was definitely to be avoided, medium green was not quite bulletproof. Then on top of this was the tornado damage from a week or two earlier, so there were randomly felled tall spruce trees scattered through the forest, completely blocking your progress but not shown on the map. Sand terrain like this can be excellent fun if you can see where you're going, but was decidedly less so with this sort of vegetation. Still, the most significant errors were mostly my fault, the exceptions being that some were exacerbated by the fact that the laser printing was such that in full sun, I was completely incapable of distinguishing between light green and light yellow, and there was quite a bit of both on the map. If the printing technology doesn't improve, I'm going to have to give this sport up, or at least stay away from certain kinds of terrain.

C • I made exactly the same judgem... 1

10 - Splits

COC Sprint Champs, University of Saskatchewan, M21E. Nice campus for this, buildings pointing at strange angles to each other. My first error was due to some quibbles that I have with the map, the second was a vague control placement, and the third was simply my going into the space between the wrong two buildings, and not being too clean in the final few meters. I had some difficulty with the light colors (e.g. building pass-through) being difficult to read. And I was also just not running as fast as other people!

5 - Splits

The schedule during the trip to the COCs in Saskatchewan wasn't particularly conducive to doing -ups, so I just skipped them.

C • He's back!!! 1

It's possible that I also did 25 more push-ups and a dozen pull-ups, but I was trying to get a lot done that morning and I lost track.

A new PR for longest flight, right about 30 minutes in the air. Launch conditions were great, and I managed to stay closer to the ridge this time and make use of the lift band. Got to 600 feet over launch, well above the mountaintop. Nancy came along and got a few nice photos, and I also got almost the whole flight on video with my tail-boom mounted camera, but it gets pretty monotonous to watch after a while—needs editing. Time logged was sprinting back to the parking lot to get my car when the time came to load up my glider for the trip home.