Training Log Archive: ajriley

Fast Direction Change Exercise

Pretty similar to the exercises done at other training camps (the indoor soccer one in PA and the one in Boston sprint camp)

Good practice with quick directional changes and some compass practice

Route

A nice and clean orienteering training in Valley Forge Park again, this time a little more technical and more relevant to other DVOA terrain.

Focused largely on compass which went pretty well. I messed it up a little bit on 10 and 14, but otherwise I was largely successful with my lines.

Made one other mistakes on number 18 where I stopped paying attention to how far I was on the trail and cut off a bend too late, but I recovered quickly and am not too worried about something like that happening again.

Tiring break, but I'm really enjoying it :)

Route

Night O at McKaig! Probably the last orienteering of the weekend because tomorrow was cancelled :(

A few sloppy legs where mainly I lost confidence because I'm not used to running confidently at night.

Number 6 I mistook one trail for another and got totally off my compass when I should've just trusted it.

Number 13 I just really didn't have any plan going into it. Should've had a better idea of where the control was in relation to the trail/road etc.

Number 16 I just totally botched the exit from 15. Should've peeked at my compass before exiting.

Otherwise I was pretty happy with how most of the course went considering it was nighttime. Had some nice compass legs and clean routes despite the low visibility.

Oh and I also smashed myself into a tree full speed and now (2 days later) still am sore. And I ran into a lake because it was so dark. Much fun!

Red - Splits

Route

Valley Goat Mass Start with Peter and Keegan

These mass starts are so fast especially in a park like Valley Forge

Peter split off with an early skip leaving Keegan and I behind. We kept seeing Peter in the distance motivating us to push to catch up. We kept swapping the lead back and forth while cruising through the open park fields not able to catch Peter for a large part of the course.

Eventually Keegan and I closed the gap while still having one control to skip making Peter's race much harder to win. We continued to the last part of the course where there were two clear options of what to skip.

Keegan and I chose opposite controls to skip, Peter getting both. My entry into the control was really smooth and fast pushing me into a relatively strong lead into the last couple of controls.

I scrambled down onto the road and heard sirens blaring at me from just down the road. An angry park ranger stopped me and asked what I was doing running off trail in the park. I quickly explained that this was my first time in the park and I had no idea you couldn't go off trail and it was just my friends and I were going through a run through the forests.

Unfortunately the ranger was very passionately explaining the history of the park and why we can't run off the trails in the park which meant Keegan, Peter and my dad all caught me making the mess even worse.

Thankfully he was nice about it and let us go expecting us to stay on the trails so we just bailed back to the cars.

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Anyways, now about the actual training. The terrain was very open and fast for the most part. I didn't have a specific focus, it was mainly just good practice with fast orienteering, but what I gathered from the training is watch out for parallel features, make sure you know where you are entering the control, and look ahead for visible features to keep a compass

C • "first time in the park..." 4

Turkey Trot 5k! :)

I was dissapointed there were no trotting turkeys, but there was a lot of fast people which was nice.

Definitely not great race conditions, but not a bad benchmark either.

Cool down with a Wilson Park Sprint map

Not much to learn from it, but nice to run with a map regardless

C • Maps 3

Run until sundown :)

Easy run + some strides

Route - If you can figure out where I went then kudos to you

Definitely not a fast training. Tried to focus on some technical skills but got pretty sloppy towards the end.

For this course I wanted to focus on compassing as straight as possible. It went very well in the first half where I was nailing most of my compasses which is not a normal thing for me.

The second half of the course however made compassing straight pretty much obsolete which is part of why I got really sloppy with my orienteering as I kind of just kept orienteering without much purpose.

I realized by the end that for most of the controls I was much more successful when reattacking from a nearby point feature after missing the control so using absolute locations instead of relative locations will definitely be a focus of mine on future technical training.

Overall happy with the training! I love it when taking a compass is successful and that was what I focused on and took away from the training.