Training Log Archive: iansmithIn the 1 days ending Mar 30, 2008:
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Sunday Mar 30, 2008 #
Event: NEOC Rocky Woods
Orienteering race 2:48:27 [3] *** 8.3 km (20:18 / km)
spiked:8/19c slept:8.0 shoes: 200712 NB Absorb EX 11.5
After a night of spontaneity, I ran my first blue course, and the first major orienteering event of the year. I'm ambivalent about my performance; some of the course went really well, whereas some of it was disastrous. Jeff Shapiro set up a solid course, particularly given how small the park was (about 2 km x 2 km) at the Rocky Woods Reservation.
I manned the registration booth until 1 PM, so I started last - leaving at 1:30 PM. Fortunately, Jeff Shapiro knew I had been working on improving in the fall and was ambitious, so he wasn't concerned when I wasn't back relatively late in the day.
What went well:
- My compass worked great
- I was strong on about half the course (controls 4 - 11, 13, 14), navigating and running pretty well.
- I didn't give up. While this may be a trivial point to note, I was considering abandoning the course after I hit the wall.
What went poorly:
- There were four controls with tremendous error - 1, 2, 12, and 15. With a fifth control - 18 - I amassed 86 minutes (just more than half my total time) over about 30% of the total course length. What's particularly distressing is that I missed controls 1 and 2 - setting an unpleasant, diffident tone for the rest of the course.
- I stopped running intermittently on the way to control 15 and a bit afterwards.
What I need to work on:
- My pace was unacceptably low. My target is 10 min/km.
- I need to eat much more before a race; that morning, I ate half a peanut butter sandwich and a few cookies at about 10 AM. I should obtain goo or some other mid race calorie source.
- Better route choice. Several of my errors cost me much elevation - for instance, control 12, wasting much more time than even a distance error.
- Consistency: following the set procedure on each control - plan route to next control, memorize control code, and so on.
- Psychology: encountering other runners in the woods has always been a great weakness of mine. There were few runners in the woods as I ran, and I didn't actually know any of the other blue competitors, but had I encountered the usual crowd - Brendan, Sam Saeger, Ross, and so on - I would probably have been thrown off even more.
- Better distance judgment and intuition on a 1:15000 map.
I'm glad I ran this course, even if I wasn't quite adequately prepared for it. Now I have a (very generous) baseline against which to improve and prepare for the 19 April Middle Distance Champs. I'm done running classes that are not M-21.
I manned the registration booth until 1 PM, so I started last - leaving at 1:30 PM. Fortunately, Jeff Shapiro knew I had been working on improving in the fall and was ambitious, so he wasn't concerned when I wasn't back relatively late in the day.
What went well:
- My compass worked great
- I was strong on about half the course (controls 4 - 11, 13, 14), navigating and running pretty well.
- I didn't give up. While this may be a trivial point to note, I was considering abandoning the course after I hit the wall.
What went poorly:
- There were four controls with tremendous error - 1, 2, 12, and 15. With a fifth control - 18 - I amassed 86 minutes (just more than half my total time) over about 30% of the total course length. What's particularly distressing is that I missed controls 1 and 2 - setting an unpleasant, diffident tone for the rest of the course.
- I stopped running intermittently on the way to control 15 and a bit afterwards.
What I need to work on:
- My pace was unacceptably low. My target is 10 min/km.
- I need to eat much more before a race; that morning, I ate half a peanut butter sandwich and a few cookies at about 10 AM. I should obtain goo or some other mid race calorie source.
- Better route choice. Several of my errors cost me much elevation - for instance, control 12, wasting much more time than even a distance error.
- Consistency: following the set procedure on each control - plan route to next control, memorize control code, and so on.
- Psychology: encountering other runners in the woods has always been a great weakness of mine. There were few runners in the woods as I ran, and I didn't actually know any of the other blue competitors, but had I encountered the usual crowd - Brendan, Sam Saeger, Ross, and so on - I would probably have been thrown off even more.
- Better distance judgment and intuition on a 1:15000 map.
I'm glad I ran this course, even if I wasn't quite adequately prepared for it. Now I have a (very generous) baseline against which to improve and prepare for the 19 April Middle Distance Champs. I'm done running classes that are not M-21.