Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Team Trials middle, Rockhouse. Attackpoint says I had two errors, of 20 and 26 seconds, although there were smaller hesitations on a lot of controls. Still, that's a pretty clean run. I'm obviously very slow compared to this strong field, but some notable orienteers weren't that far ahead.

Team Trials sprint, Lake Welch Beach. Prettysimple course, and almost perfect navigation, the one gaffe being control #15, where I ran right past the flag and saw it, but it was sooner that I expected, and the vegetation didn't look like what I saw on the map, so I assumed it was a Red control, and ran ahead to the thicket that I thought it would be on. Circling back after being baffled cost me a little over a minute. Aside from that, I was just slow, due in part to being tired from the morning event. Showing up at the bottom of the list makes it look like I had a bad run, but I really didn't. And I did have a valid result, unlike a few other people in this race (and this weekend). After all the orieneering that I've done, there are some fundamentals that I do have down solidly, and there are very very few cases in my long history where I've mispunched or skipped a control.

Mystery Blazes loop. Headache in the morning that never completely went away (must have been that CMC I had for dessert last night), and I felt pretty crummy all day, so in the evening I decided to try and salvage something out of the day by getting some exercise. Felt kind of unfocused the whole time, but also felt like the opposite of dragging something heavy -- not a pleasant feeling of being lifted and helped along, but more like being shoved by some unseen presence. Still, it beats feeling like lead. Kept up this hustling pace pretty much the whole way, and hoped to be under 50 minutes, figuring that going under 45 would be outstanding. Well, whaddya know? I think this might be a PR for this run, though the route isn't all that precisely defined, and I think what I originally called Mystery Blazes was something in the opposite direction, but I'm fuzzy on some of the details.

Huntington, WCOC A-meet, classic distance. Not as clean as yesterday, but no huge errors -- the biggest one was standing basically still for at least a minute trying to figure out where I was, with the control (or at least the feature) visible from where I was standing. Just a bit too far into oxygen debt. Had another one of those later on when I was right where I wanted to be, but lost track of which leg I was on and couldn't figure it out until I did some breathing. My time for the long leg wasn't very good, even though I think my route choice was fine (though I lost a bit of time on a couple of smaller wiggles in the middle of the leg). Hung on well enough to take 3rd in M45, just 26 seconds behind Ernst and about 2.5 minutes down on Krum for the weekend. Stefan also got me on day 2 (he didn't run day 1). I definitely left the door open for those guys, as I had enough errors on Sunday to account for the deficit. If I'm in company with the likes of those guys, I'm not feeling too bad about things. Absolutely excellent weekend as far as what WCOC served up. This was the best meet I've been to in a long time. The terrain and courses both days were top notch.

C • You did real good, I think ... 4