Training Log Archive: W

Alright! Time for the NAOC sprint! I can't possibly botch this, can I?

Turns out, yep! It was a relatively easy course, and I was nailing it, until I got to number 11. I looked at it and thought "okay, this is going to be a bit tricky". And I had it generally sorted for a while. I went around the marsh, up the hill to the clearing, down the path, then went up the path a bit, past the fork, and then bearing it into the forest. I felt that the re-entrant would be relatively obvious, and it would lead me right into the control.

It didn't. But honestly, I have no idea where I went. I stood on the top of a hill, looked to my left and saw a ridge by me. That all made sense. The control should have been just below me on my left, on the south side of the top of the hill beside some thicker vegetation. But it wasn't. I went down the hill, thinking I was maybe on the next hill to the south. Nope. I went back east, and came upon one of those boulders on the side of the hill. At that point I headed in the right direction, and found it no problem.

And when I found it, I thought, "BUT I WAS STANDING RIGHT HERE!". And I'm certain I was. It was all so familiar, that I was sure I was on the top of that exact hill. Could it have been on the other side of a tree before I turned to the side? I don't know. Even now, this really really feels like a case of not navigating poorly, just literally not seeing the control from mere meters away. I don't how that was possible.

Needless to say you get halfway through a minute mistake like that and you're well aware that the race is over. The fact is that if that control had even gone at "merely okay" split, I still would have won the race. I pulled back 22 seconds on Ross and 16 seconds on Thomas in the last 5 minutes of the course. Hell, I even put 7 seconds on Yannick. Maybe it was a product of fury, I don't know.

In all, in none of these three races didn't anyone beat me. I lost.

Although infuriating, it doesn't make me doubt my ability to beat everyone on any given day, in any given race. The only person that worries me is myself.

And most Europeans.

http://youtu.be/j5kgXwPqZjg?t=1m30s

NAOC national team relay. Blah blah blah was not enthusiastic about this race at all.

Yet, I made no mistakes. Huh. Something to think about.

Also, for the record, despite not caring, I still always want to win. There shouldn't be any doubt on that.

Blue - Sprint - Splits

I was feeling relatively okay for this long. Brush of the middle, the long is better for me, I thought. And as people like Yannick came in running around 1:45, I thought that this was going to be a long long, maybe better for me.

Unfortunately, it all unraveled on the way to 2. I'm not quite sure what happened. I nailed 1 no problem, and headed off towards two. I seem to have started to veer off left. When I got to within sight of the large open lake, I got rather confused. I first mistook the lake and its nearby marsh to be a poorly mapped marsh and its nearby lake - I had veered left. But then, I studied my map briefly, and because nothing lined up, I convinced myself I had done a 180 and left the control in the entirely wrong direction. I'm not certain what evidence I used to base this on, I think problem because the start triangle was pointing in the opposite direction as the north lines, and then I mis-read number 1 upside down. Nevertheless, because I had veered left, absolutely nothing made sense, and I now could no longer feel confident on which way was up. So, I ran back to number 1, and restarted. At that point I determined I was actually correct, and continued on again, though painfully, veering left again. Was my compass no longer working? I don't know. Something was playing tricks on my brain, as time seemed to slow down and the compass spun in strange circles. Maybe when I stopped to double-check I was standing on a pile of iron? I think back on it and I'm certain I re-oriented myself and a bearing from 1 to 2 pointed my back in the opposite direction.

Anyway, once I got myself back on track, I promptly had another disaster at 3. I never really quite got my distance judgement right on this map. My theory is that it was because the white forest had such wild swings in "white-ness", I could never quite get my speed dialled in since it changed so much. I ended up way too high up along the spur and wandered around there for a while. I found many unmarked boulders as well. I needed to go another 100 meters down the hill, though, to be even remotely close.

At this point in the race I was already 10 minutes behind, and Eric had caught me. I thought to myself that if over the next few legs I could drop Eric and then I could bring myself back into the race, but by 12 I had made no time on him at all. At 13 I took a more direct route which a bad choice. I'm sure left along the trail was the best. By the end of the long leg Eric had put more time into me, and I proceeded to phone in the rest of the race. Most controls were an exercise in getting close and then wasting too much time in the circle, and the body just didn't feel like going that extra mile on the climbs.

I gotta tell ya, I didn't much like that map. Naturally I like maps I win on, but I felt like the vegetation was so variable, even in seemingly identical colours. I don't move fast in slow forest, so that probably didn't help either. Finished the race feeling fresh as a daisy, and even headed out back at the camp to do a jog around the model map. This is the second race in a row where I made a mistake very early in the race. In retrospect, though, it doesn't matter when I make the mistakes, I'm always equally furious.

Blue Long - Splits

Well well, time to start the train wreck that was the NAOCs in New York. Started off by getting in at 1AM after a Vancouver flight debacle had me waiting in the airport for quite sometime and then joining in with Ontario Doc Smith's car and hotel room. This was actually quite fortunate as it could have been much, much worse, as in spending the night in the Newark airport, which is an atrocious airport.

Anyway, started the middle having not been on the model map, and warming up on the almost entirely useless warm-up map. I really tried to be careful to number 1, but I really, really, could not figure out the map very quickly. As I was running through the seemingly white parts of forest, it kept changing from what to me was far more green, and then green would change types, but stay technically green the map. I feel like the vegetation was all over the place, and I really had no idea where I was going. I found many, many other controls, ran in circles a few times as I attempted to relocate by the numerous rocks that were not on the map, until I bailed down to the trail, but managed to relocate part way and then found my control relatively quickly after that. Oh yeah, also, when I started --> torrential downpour.

If I remember rightly, after all that, I believe I was just on the low side of the control, and since below the control was a patch of green, I would not have seen it on the other side (this was a recurring theme).

So, I was pretty much out of the race before the first control. In fury, I crushed most of the rest of the course, winning the split at 3,4 and 6, and pulling people along with me in my rage-wake. I get quite annoyed by having to deal with clusters of controls near mine, which happens often at these sort of events, so there were quite a few lost seconds for that as well. My own fault, really, for not recognizing the feature in the circle, but there was a whole section on a line of cliffs, and it was a bit of stretch to claim some where on a re-entrant versus a cliff versus a tree that's 6 inches from the cliff. I mean, really, they're all on cliffs.

Ultimately, I climbed from 65th from number 1 to 9th at the finish. If I remove the time lost on number 1, I would have won the race. I'm not quite sure how I could have attacked the control differently. If I had been on the model I might have been able to better identify the white forest with the distinct boundary. Maybe I should have gone over the hill to the trail, but the trails were very hard to see. I tried to stay on a bearing but that was just too difficult with the green in the way. I briefly flirted with the idea of going down to the trail too. Maybe that would have done it.

Either way, race 1 was a disaster. Will tomorrow be better? (clue: No).

Middle - Blue - Splits

Setting out flags and then bringing them back for the wednesday night orienteering training. Between the fam we only had two headlamps, because they didn't bring the other one. One headlamp was my nice new one, and then other was a tiny petzl that hadn't been checked for battery power, so it was virtually non-existant. I went out to pick up some of the flags in the virtual dark, and its a new level of hard.

Maybe after I exhaust night training on the all the maps so well, I can move on to complete darkness training. Then maybe I'll move on to running with a blank piece of paper.

Fartlek intervals down whitemud. Between my sister and I, we'd jog, and then someone would randomly say "go" and you'd need to accelerate and pretty much run as hard as you can until that same person says stop. Typically about 20-30 seconds or so. Can't say I felt all that fast, unfortunately.

Evening yog because... why not, really.

Did a light hour run in the morning before yet another busy busy day, involving some mapping and an oddly large amount of driving. Yeah, I know that these silly easy runs are just filler, but, they feel better than just doing nothing. I'm sure many could make the argument that they're not doing anything for me shape and are just volume filler so that I can log it on my AP.

Yep, that's pretty much it.