Training Log Archive: CleverSky

US Middle Champs, Lynn Woods, M45. I'm being kind to myself by saying I spiked 14, because SA says there were only 12 without time loss. Certainly not free from sloppiness, although in a relative sense I did a lot better than yesterday, 7th in M45 and 4th American. If I had cut my time loss in half (which shouldn't have been that difficult), I'd be tied for 2nd. A clean run would still have had me behind three younger guys, so my speed isn't too horrible. I'm not alone in having this much time lost to errors, though. Some were tricky navigation, but some (including the biggest ones) were just plain dumb. This was clearly a day when picking the right category would have helped, though; if I had run M35, I would have come home with gold.

Looking at the graph, I had a great start. In 3rd place (on the whole course) through #10, and still holding onto 4th through #13, but the slide just continued, I was just an error machine in the second half. Again, the errors were all different: inability to figure out which marsh I was looking at, failure to look the all the way around a boulder when I got to it, hitting the wrong trail and turning the wrong way, failing to see the blob of fight on the straight route, pulling up short on the wrong bare rock area, failure to pay enough attention to either the map or compass and getting confused in an easy area...

US Sprint Champs, Franklin Park, M45. Egad. Embarrassingly awful. Blew 1/3 of the controls, one of them to the tune of about five minutes (I think I was really close, but didn't look far enough down the slope for another boulder, then just wandered aimlessly in dumb places for a while). Probably every error was a different thing going wrong in my brain. Hard to believe that I supposedly know how to do this at all after a fiasco like this.

Interesting: my per km time for this race was just a hair slower than my time for the Highlander (where I was pretty much walking the second half).

C • I know what you mean 3