Training Log Archive: smittyo

Sprint at Salmon La Sac. An interesting combination of trail running and short, technical legs. I didn't have any major technical issues, but I got tired of running the trails and decided to take a fairly long leg through some medium green to a yellow patch. I pretty much knew that I'd lose time doing this, but just felt like some variety. I figure I lost about 4 minutes and haven't analyzed the splits enough to be sure. Messed up #10 somehow. I took the trail across the stream and then followed the yellow and stream toward the control, but apparently what I followed wasn't really the stream since I ended up quite a bit off to the right and had to run back to the actual mapped stream. I've heard a few others who had a similar experience so the map may be funky in this area. Ended up second in age class to Karin Didisse.

Salmon Run Sprint 2 - Splits

Had to find a team for this and I was lucky to be hanging with the BAOC crowd where Joan Roos offered up her grandson Amos Meeks. He's about 16 years old with a Red ranking not too far below the JWOC cut-off. So that was an exciting prospect and we set about finding others to join the team. The five member Breseman family had to sacrifice someone and decided to let Eileen go since she was worth more points and might find a new team more easily. Eileen recruited Ardis Dull and we had the makings of a fine high point team. We called it "Team Amos" since we figured Amos couldn't refuse to be on a team named after him (he didn't).

Eileen ran first and came in a ways back but quite respectably given the competition on leg 1. It was clear watching the finishers that this would be technical, the finish order was not a straight reflection of running speed. Ardis did the second leg and picked up a few places, then I went out third and picked up quite a few more, catching a number of teams with Juniors who could keep up with the pack, but were having a harder time once teams got spread out. Amos held his own, I think he picked up at least one place and we ended up around 8th overall and first place in the 10 pt. category.

Still hoping for the elusive LAOC team. Although four LAOCers were in attendance during the weekends (me, Bruce, Allen, and Will) I was the only one at this midweek relay.

Kid at Fishtrap lake. Harvey came with me, so we sauntered along at an extremely easy pace. No trouble with the navigation, although I followed the wrong pack at the very beginning and ended up further right on the way to number 1 then intended. Corrected for this much earlier than many others though. I don't think anyone took what I think was probably the very best route - to go far left above the cliffs and approach from the top. Went fairly straight to most things, except to avoid water features. Harvey got his first taste of wading through a knee deep swamp. A nice little hike.

Sprint 1 at Riverside State Park. Just a "fun" sprint (not A, but part of the sprint series). This was quite technical for a sprint with an area of large bouldery knolls that ccould be confusing. No huge errors, but not always the best route choices. Left #1 to the right and was fairly committed by the time I realized what a crappy choice that was - green and on the wrong side for the control. I ended up actually climbing over the rocky knoll to get to #2 on the other side of it. Many people had difficulty with #4. I went straight through and somehow managed to find a reasonable direct route without going through too much green. Not sure how my time would compare to going around on the trail. Overall, happy with this run. I seem to have made fewer errors than most.

"fun" sprint #2. In general a faster and less technical race than the morning. Not as happy this time around. Was doing great until #8. Then I let my confidence take me down the dark path of humility. Instead of staying on the trail to attack from the clearing (as many did), I just figured I could handle the straight through route. But the vegetation on this map was not very representative, having grown a lot since the last revision and I mistook a lot of fight for the wrong stuff. Eventually I bailed back toward the trail to reattack and luckily managed to relocate on some rocky ground early and attacked the control.

Spent the travel day at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center near Baker City, OR. We spent a lot of time perusing the museum displays and then close to 2 hours hiking the trails, looking at the ruts and the views and the mining exhibits. Definitely worthwhile.

Very different from yesterday. Today's map was fast, spur and reentrant orienteering. An excellent course. I was worried that it wouldn't be technical enough and turn into a running race, but judging from the errors people were making, it was plenty technical. Also did a great job of discouraging trail routes. They rarely seemed like the best choice for very far.

The western states champion awards were based on two-day total time and were very cool (little mining pans) so I wanted one. Eileen Breseman was my only competition and she was five minutes ahead of me from day one, so I wasn't very hopeful. I made a pretty decent error from #2 to #3. I climbed up a hill and thought I had climbed more diagonally then I did, so I misjudged where I was on the top of the ridge and went down in the wrong direction, taking me a ways away from the control. When I hit a main road that didn't look like, I spent some time relocating and then got back on track. Time loss - about 3 minutes. Saw Eileen just before #6. Both of us thought that I had caught up to her (turns out she started behind me and had made up 8 minutes already). We took different routes into the control and I was surprised to find it, take a drink and get away without seeing her. Kept going feeling better that I was apparently having a good run. Had a nice clean race from there. it turned out that she made a parallel error at #6 and lost a lot of time. In the end, I got the gold pan!

This was a very gnarly course! That 6% climb in the specs only begins to tell the story. The area was extremely complex. So much so that the map was at 1:7500. Lots of steep reentrants, narrow spurs, ditches going everywhere, and small knolls. Most of it shown with actual contours. The course was designed to keep you in the most technical terrain constantly.

Started out very poorly with an 8 minute error at number 1. Lot of different reasons for this, but I prefer to blame it on the mapper :-). Knowing the scale was different I started out prepared to check my pace count and immediately got distracted and didn't really measure the leg I was on. So even though I was counting, I still didn't know where I was. I was planning to attack from a small marsh not far from the control. The area was flat and mapped about 2/3 yellow with scattered patches of greens and whites. Since the marsh was mapped in the yellow, I was checking all the clearings for any sign of marshiness and never found it, finally just charging up the slope hoping to find the control without a decent attack. It didn't work and after spending quite a few minutes trying to relocate in the technical terrain to no avail I went back down to the flats and reattacked from a much larger and identifiable marsh further from the control. After the race I went back out to find the small marsh and discovered that it was actually a marshy thicket. I had run right by it and stopped to look for it when I hit the open just past it.

Shelagh Pepper caught up with me at number 2 and we stayed together through the rest of the race. Saw a lot of people over and over again as well. I didn't have any other serious errors, but the technicality slowed me down a lot. To stay on track you had to be reading the map details constantly. I really wish there had been a model even for this. I ended up about 5 minutes behind my competitors.