Training Log Archive: W

Coach Kim provided me with a fast sharpening track workout to do before heading off to Sweden for the start of my month long O-dyssy. It involved 800 @ 2:34, 600 @ 1:42, 400 @ 62s, and 2 x 200 @ 32 seconds. He suggested it was going to be hard, and it was!

But, I managed to achieve those times pretty well, actually going 1:38 for 600 and running 31 and 28 for the 200s, so they were even a little too fast. Really short warm-up between the intervals, so the effort came fast and furious but was good stuff. I liked it.

Day 4 of KRV say much improved focus and some solid execution, but some simple mistakes lost me some time on another unacceptable large mistake.

This particular one all started off with leaving the control in a poor direction. That's it. I hurried a bit too much, and if I'd just compassed a little better in the correct direction I would have had no problems. Instead, I went off way right, realized it, was able to compensate with a new route choice, but then got confused by the cliffs along the side of the hill and stopped to soon and turned back, only to decided to bail to the road I had wanted to go to in the first place. All because my first 10 steps away from the control were poor.

Still, there was a long leg on a vague hillside that went pretty well. Sure, there was an elephant track for a lot of the way, but I was able to see important features on the way to continually remind me I was going in the right direction. That was positive, as were many other legs.

By the end of KRV I was doing many things right I wasn't doing at the beginning. I don't know why I became so braindead on day 1 and had to slowly work back to getting my head in the right place, but eventually it was back to normal-ish and hopefully maybe a little bit better thanks to all the lessons I learned along the way.

I'm trying not to label all the things I did poorly as things I need to improve, rather taking all the things I did and labelling them as "things to think about", and then writing down actionable items that will make myself better, rather than stop making thing worse.

Day 3 of KRV, a middle distance! While the elite folks get to do 15k on 1:15, we get to do 6k on 1:10. Whoopeeee.

At first, this race went really well, doing a lot of aggressive things, slowing down when necessary, running pretty hard, a little hook on 7, and then 8 came along.

I had to go down a hill, across a marsh, and then through a super vague flat section to find the end of a form line hill. The thing was, if I'd gone a little left, I could have jumped on a small ride and then had a better idea of when to go back into the woods and find the control. Instead, I decided to go straight, but I really had not much to go on since the last really distinct feature I saw was a solid 100m behind me. I couldn't find it, bailed out to the trail, tried again, missed, bailed out again, determined where the hill was, and then tried again and got it, but lost multi-minutes in the process. I suspect the second time I was close and just didn't see it.

The mistake was quite demoralizing and confidence blowing, so I made a mistake on the next leg when I let other people make me think I'd gone too far (I hadn't).

I think the conclusion from this race was that there is a line between aggressive and reckless, and I went over to reckless. It would have been an extremely short detour to go off to the left slightly and hit the trail to give me a good position to attack the control with, but I decided to go straight, because.... well, Euros go straight. But with a little bit of invested time I would have saved tons of time in retrospect. It was a high risk - low reward endeavour that blew up in my face. After 7 legs of going almost completely straight, I need to take route choice on a leg by leg basis rather than have a one size all solution for everything.

On the other hand, a few years ago would I consider "go straight" a solution for every control? Hell no. So that's a plus!

Another rest day! Weird, right! I did go for a 20 minute jog, but have decided not to log it due to its incredibly short and slow nature Did play a bunch of beach volleyball in the afternoon, though, that was nice. The sand was sore coarse and rather painful that it did wonders for the smoothness of my feet.

Day 2 of KRV went just a little bit better. After, of course, number 1. I was super resolved from yesterday not to blow it again, and I did, but not nearly as much. I thought I was being quite careful, but I was still struggling with focus and wound up not really staying on my bearing after I crossed the (actual) clearing. I got sucked up a different re-entrant and running along a different hillside which I should have caught on to with my compass because it was aligned in a different direction and wasn't nearly as steep.

I then tried to relocate and found myself again unexpectedly because the place I thought I was was not that place.

Number 5 was a significantly improvement, though, I felt better about that tough leg on a vague flat hillside, and generally other things went quite well except I left 6 reading from 8 on the map, so nothing really made much sense for about aminute until I realized I was looking at the wrong leg. I think it was because I was so overjoyed about just having found a random boulder in a total flat area.

Inexplicably, after one day of KRV, we had a rest day. Why? Apparently its because this is part race, part summer holiday for most people. Okay, fair enough. After getting up and lazing around for what was an eternity, we finally we for what I thought was a little jog at about 1PM. I'm usually in the dark about these things. I then learned we were going to do a point to point run that was about 16km long. This was a little surprising considering the other races, I wouldn't have expected there to be much interest in a somewhat longer run than that. However, it also turned out that this run was really quite slow, and for the first 4 km we pretty much only ran the downhills. I figured at this rate 16km would take us about 4 hours.

Fortunately, the trail got much flatter and we actually ran most of it. It was quite a nice trail, not very well travelled and occasionally we had to make some decisions on where we were to go next, but we got there eventually and it was a nice day and a nice time.

And then we ate at a "Starburger" attached to a gas station. It was not nearly as awful as I expected.