Training Log Archive: RLShadow

Event: ROC - Letchworth State Park (West) [2012 Series #5]
 

Indoor pickleball at the rec center with Cheryl, trailsnail, and Paul.

I felt reasonably good for the day after a rogaine (even though it was a mere 6 hour one). Even my left knee, which was problematic yesterday, felt OK.

Event: Ellicottville Adventure Run & Hike
 

Ellicottville mini-rogaine, with trailsnail. Pretty poor strategy, at least I think it was, although in retrospect I couldn't come up with a really good strategy. Executed it fairly well, really no major problems with any of the controls. Very good map, which helped. Slow moving, and my left knee started giving problems early on and they somewhat intensified as we covered more ground. Came in at 5:11 to get a new map, looked at it, decided there was nothing worth getting in the 49 minutes we had left, and that the hot dogs and chili looked way more inviting than climbing the ski hill one more time for maybe 20 or 30 more points.

We're not sure, but we can't rule out the possibility that we may have finished dead last in the 6 hour division! They announced the 1st 3 in each category but didn't have the full results posted.

Our route: 5, 6, 9, 10, 17, 12, 2, 8, 14, 19, 23, 20, 16, 4, then into HH to pick up our 2nd map and quickly conclude it wasn't worth going out again.

The first 6 controls we did were in the dreaded NW section of the map, where the controls were mostly low point value but not extremely hard (although none were totally easy).

We wanted to get a feel for the map and terrain before deciding to head down into the large valley on the east central part of the map, which had only 3 controls but they were all fairly high value. The valley had no prominent trails (some logging trails were there but we were warned that the logging trails could be a bit risky to count on for navigation or for traveling on).

Controls in the SW and S central part of the map seemed too far away from the HH and from each other for us to want to tackle, given that we knew we weren't going to be moving all that fast.

Overall, I'm thinking we did about as well as e could except we made a strategic mistake in not getting #15, which we should have gotten after we got #19 and before we got #23. The navigation looked to be fairly tricky and we were worried about time, but in retrospect it wasn't any tougher than 19 and 23 which we had no major trouble with (although we were very careful when going to both of those -- losing contact with the map would have been pretty disastrous in those areas). It probably would have taken us no more than 15-20 extra minutes to get #15 (which was a 40 pt control) and we finished with 49 minutes to spare.

I put us down as spiking all 14 controls but my definition of spiking is definitely looser for rogaines than orienteering events. In no cases did we need to re-attack anything, nor did we lose more than a couple of minutes at any control. There was one (#14) on a spur between two streams, very close to the junction of the stream, that we didn't see when we thought we were in the center of the circle, but after about a minute of confusion spotted it almost right at the stream junction (such that "stream junction" would have seemed a better description than "spur".). That's an example of the fairly minor issues we had locating a few controls, that I still counted as spikes.

The GPS trace looks a little odd because it was on the "reading every second" mode and with my old semi-functional GPS there is no way for me to change that setting, so it saved the tracks for the last 3.5 hours or so, discarding the part earlier than that. The distance should be right, though, we just don't have the tracks or the laps on the control points in the trace.

Late afternoon walk with Homer, to Finn Park and back, but only to the edge of the field.

Indoors at the Rec Center. Five of us: Cheryl, trailsnail, Ken, Kay, me. Nice games.

A walk in Gosnell Woods, with Cheryl, Homer, and our daughter Andrea who is up visiting for a few days. No GPS, so the distance is an estimate.

Very pleasant day for a walk in the woods.

More Durand field checking.