Training Log Archive: slow-twitch

Used as much of the hike to the pre-start and then to the start-proper as possible as a warm-up run. Can claim it was traffic rather than climb on the latter parts which stopped me from running more of it! To an accompienment of falcon, bellbirds, tomtits and possibly brown creepers (maybe just bellbirds that have been listening to brown creepers). Nice.

NZ Champs Long - St Arnaud
I want to remember this as a truly epic long distance race and a unique experience rather than by the half hour lost in the first kilometre or the busted ankle in the last. Hopefully time will play the usual tricks with the memory! So it looks like out of the M40's I was one of the least affected by the start triangle misplacement, probably because I figured if I'd come off my bearing I would have drifted left which set me up to trip over the control nicely when 'correcting'. I don't know why I have a comparitively slow time for 2 when I reckon I aced that one... #3 is where it all fell apart - when I missed on first attack, all my relocation efforts were based on the theories a=that I'd overrun or b=was too high. Not helpful when I was actually too low. Blew more time on 4, kept getting into the right reentrant but the wrong part... and from there it thankfully started to come right, which in combination with some angry running, might have even got me back into, well, somewhere near the race. Small losses at 10 (passed too high), 16 & 17 (I liked the intent of the final loop through the village, but apparently struggled to get my head out of the forest and into urban map reading), then starting the run towards the final control, (after 1 hour 44 crashing through steep rocky forest finding every single trip hazard), while coming off a paved road to cut across a smooth, mowed, campground lawn, turned my ankle very badly. A 500m walk has never felt so long... but I finished!

C • Oh dear 3

to the start and round and round and round near the start

NZ Middle Champs - St Arnaud.
So actually I liked the model event much better. I wouldn't say this was a bad course, it would have been fine for a filler race in the middle of a multi-day, but not good enough for a middle distance championship. It should have been the 10 minutes lost thanks to an over-run of control 6, or the bit-too-much faffing on the way into 1 that took me out of the race, not the accurate, direct, navigation into most of the other controls which penalised me against those who turned basically every leg into a track-run. Even within the limitations of the map it feels like an opportunity lost for something really special.

C • course 1

Event: NZ Orienteering Champs
 

Easily 10 minutes with Mr Harris cruising up and down the brook (which makes for a lovely warm-up area) pre-race, and maybe about 5 minutes too long after, after-race

NZ Sprint champs, Nelson. Just too slow on the day to be competitive, definitely not in the same shape as for Waitangi! Technically ok though, apart from trying to use a non-existent route choice to 11 (bad), and missing some gaps which led to an unnecessarily long way in to 15 (minor). Through 1 and 2 thought I was getting off to a bad start, but afterwards can't see any better way of getting them, and at this point I was pretty well placed suggesting everyone else had also been pretty cautious at the start ...or they weren't! Also thought during the course there wasn't much in the way of route choice options but have spotted quite a few afterwards - in some cases probably better than ones I used but not so much that I should have spent a few more seconds thinking on the relevant legs. What I really liked was how the 'terrain' kept changing through the course - just when you were getting your head into each part of the map, you were into the next, different, part.

Middle Model, in which I first took long enough to get my brain out of 1:4000 and in to 1:10 000 to start feeling very sceptical about the mapping; then had everything suddenly start to make sense; then started feeling very confident about the mapping and my ability to make use of it; then came to the conclusion that tomorrow would be a full-on technical challenge, causing carnage for anyone who took it lightly

One easy warm-up, one or two not quite successful attempts on an otherwise easy climb that finishes with a tricky overhang that I hadn't tried for a while and the rest of the night on the grade 16 project that I've been working on forever. Which, just quietly, I made tonight - neither cleanly nor convincingly but hand touched pipe at least 3 times. I'm taking that. (for now)

Two days off sick - seems that Saturday's lack of energy may have been the beginning of something in the guts. Ah well, not like the lead-up to nationals has gone anything close to plan anyway...