Training Log Archive: Lori

Event: Sycamore Scramble
 

Running to the start of the middle.

Woke up still with the headache from yesterday, which was a depressing start to the day. (In retrospect - logging this Monday, I was obviously already sick on Saturday.) I took some ibuprofen and drank lots of fluids in the morning and the headache was more or less gone by the time I started the race. (I only noticed it if my head was really jostled for some reason.) The good thing about this race was that I was moving quickly and only noticed really being tired at one or two points during the race. The bad thing was that I was moving too quickly...

Controls 1 and 2 went beautifully. I navigated well and came out exactly on the control. The leg from 2 to 3 was very short (the control circles were basically touching) and my brain turned off. I started compass bearing to the control, figuring I would hit it, no problem and looked ahead to the next control. Big mistake. I ended up billiard ball orienteering this one and lost 4-5 minutes here. I bounced off the field near 3 first, then my bearing was a bit wrong and I bounced off the stream, up to the road, which I ran along and bounced off the clearing again, and finally went into 3 correctly.

I took stock of my situation and went off to 4. I spiked 4 exactly, checked the code and it was wrong. Complete confusion. Ok, I thought, I'm one spur too close. I went to the next spur. Also, wrong. Checked my codes again and realized I was looking at the code for 5, not 4. I was correct the first time. Back to 4 and punched. I probably only lost about 45s here, but I was upset at the sheer stupidity of this error.

I decided to be safe to 5. So 5 and 6 were both fine. I saw Holly on the way to 7, stupidly sped up, and really screwed it up: actually ended up at 8 before 7. Luckily 8 was not that far from either 6 or 7, so I lost 1-2 minutes here.

The rest of the course was clean. Without the mistakes, it looks like I could have been 30:30-33:30, which would have put me right up with Holly and Tori. I came out of this pleased with my fitness but not so much with my navigation. Running quickly is good, but it can't be at the cost of turning my brain off.

Jogging and walking back from the middle finish to the meet headquarters.

Ultimate String-O and general jogging around before the sprint.

Woohoo! Awesome sprint! I took what happened in the morning to heart and decided I would not do similarly stupid things during the sprint and I didn't. I had one 15-20s mistake and general fatigue throughout, but in general this was a really clean sprint.

I looked at my control description sheet when I entered the start corral and saw tons of building controls. Since the start and finish were both in the campground area, and there were lots of cabins around, I knew getting the cabins confused was going to be a major way to lose little bits of time all over the place. Ok, I thought, keep track of your buildings.

The course started out uphill, which was the first indication that I was in fact quite tired from the morning (and as it turns out from being sick, but I didn't know that at the time). I knew this was going to make it more difficult to stay focused, but I just doubled my focusing effort. Straight to number 1, glanced around the buildings, found the one I knew was correct, went around to the correct corner, and yup, my control! This was basically how the entire sprint went. In general I went straight to every control unless there was some extreme reason not to. In one case, the road was slightly off the line, but I figured I could run faster on the road than through the woods, so I took it until it turned. In another there was a bit of green to go around, but generally straight was the way to go. The only control I didn't spike was 9. I saw it as I came into the cabin area but miscounted the cabins and thought it wasn't mine (since just about every cabin out there had a control...), so I checked out the next cabin over. There wasn't a control on that one. I glanced around and realized, the original cabin was correct, so I went back to it. The cabins were pretty close together, so I think I only lost about 15-20s here.

Generally I felt like my legs were really dragging, but I am very pleased with how this race went, especially considering that the fatigue was likely due to sickness.

Model event at Sycamore Scramble. This weekend got off to an inauspicious start at 3:30am on Friday. I had gone to sleep Thursday night with time to get about 7 hours of sleep before I had to get up to catch my plane to Raleigh - not ideal but with the option of sleeping on the plane, certainly doable. At 3:30am, I get a call...what?!? 3:30am??!?!?!? Delta has canceled my flight for no apparent reason. Grrr... Ok, so after being up for an hour, I am switched to an American Airlines flight at the same time, but I have to get to the airport an hour earlier to deal with the Delta and American people who are of course in different terminals. Ok, down 2 hours of sleep. I get to the airport, AA has my name spelled incorrectly. Grumble...eventually everything gets fixed, and I actually end up getting to Raleigh 20 or 30 minutes earlier than I originally was scheduled to. I was feeling really dehydrated and tired and had a headache, but I had planned to go run the model event, so I went anyway. It was a lot of fun. I was running reasonably quickly and navigating well. My arches, which had been giving me problems, were cramping up, so I decided to wear my running shoes for the weekend since Umstead is reasonably conducive to whatever sorts of shoes. I tried to drink as much water as I could throughout the day, but my headache just wouldn't go away and I still felt sort of yuck.

Picking up controls at the model event. I was wearing sneakers and jeans and my head felt like it was going to explode. It was nice to get on the map again, but maybe a nap would have been better...

CSU training at Cat Rock set by Ian (although amusingly not attended by Ian). Drove out with Katia, Giovanni, and Presto and met up with Ross, Alex, Dean, and Andy. The park was covered in 4-8in of snow (depending on how well the snow got through the tree cover). It was absolutely gorgeous out there with the snow! Running was a bit difficult. It was also hard to see the caution tape streamering the controls, so I wasted quite a bit of time at the feature looking for the streamer. Presto thought bounding through the snow was the best thing ever :-). At lot of features were covered up by snow and I think my light needs new batteries, so I was having some trouble seeing things, which made navigation interesting.

Second sprint at Cat Rock. I got a bit confused on number 1 on this sprint, but then things were pretty clean until 8, when I couldn't see the streamer. Alex caught up to me here and then I was just being an idiot trying to stay with/ahead of Alex the rest of the course and not navigating especially well/at all anymore. A good wake-up to not let people around me affect what I do.

My right hip is REALLY hurting tonight. I'm not sure why. Maybe because of the gate change running in the snow requires or just the additional force it requires or the skiing last weekend or maybe it is completely unrelated. Anyway, I did the usual nerve glides and back extensions, which after the extreme pain of the stretches, did make me feel a bit better. I think I will take tomorrow off aside from stretching, so hopefully I'll be feeling back to normal for the weekend.

Running in the snow with Presto! Ran from my apartment to the river and then did the JFK-River St. loop crossing every bridge. The snow was a lot of fun, but definitely made running harder what with not being able to see and having to slog through it.

Nerve glides and back extensions.

Long distance Ski-O champs at Craftsbury. This was a lot of fun! The conditions were a lot better today, which was nice, and it was snowing the whole time! I had one embarrassing mistake after taking a short cut and not being sure where I came out which cost me 10 minutes because of my slow skiing and inability to relocate. Taking all the features off a map other than the trails and the contours can make it REALLY hard to relocate. Other than that this was pretty clean. I took my skis off quite a few times to traverse some of the pink and green dotted trails as well as to run on the road between 8 and 9 and run down the reentrant to get to 7 (carrying skis and poles and running in ski boots, which were NOT made for running). Unfortunately putting the skis back on took a ridiculous amount of time, so I lost a decent amount of time to that. The official straight-line distance was 11.3km, but I'm using Ken's garmin's record of the real distance, since we more or less had to stay on trails the whole time.

Nerve glides and back extensions.

Red Long Distance - Splits