Training Archive: CristinaIn the 30 days ending 2006-11-30:
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| W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Thursday Nov 30 | ||
| Note | |
| Tough decision, but I'm going to have to reverse my hasty decision to go to the Possum Trot. :(
I'll be kicking myself if I'm not ridiculously productive starting right now. | ||
| C • Too bad 12 | ||
Wednesday Nov 29 | ||
| Note | |
| It's snowing in ABQ!
Not enough (by far) in the valley even to make a snow caterpillar, but maybe enough on top of the mountain to make a snow squirrel. Nasty winds and snow/rain forced us to skip the run, so instead we went apartment hunting. Very productive. | ||
| C • congrats on getting some snow 3 | ||
Tuesday Nov 28 | ||
| Running (road) 30:00 [2] 3.1 mi (9:40 / mi) +25m 5:52 / km | |
| slept:8.0 shoes: Kayano XII (pink) | ||
| Fell asleep ridiculously early last night, so I was awake ridiculously early. I thought going for a run was a good idea, but really it wasn't fun. I don't know why, but it was awful, like I was breathing through a straw. Maybe it was first day of class jitters. (ha!) More likely, I'm just not used to running in the morning anymore. Or something. Maybe I was just hungry.
At least the view was cool. The clouds were just barely below the crest level, so just south of the crest (which is about 1000' lower) the rising sun was peeping through, making all the clouds pink. It was neat. | ||
| Swimming 20:00 [1] 0.8 km (25:00 / km) | |
| Quick swim after class and before retrieving Seabass from the airport. Car (still) at the shop... definitely not cool to feel dependent on a car.
Nice, in a way, to be back on base near all the facilities. | ||
Saturday Nov 25 | ||
| Running (trail) 40:00 [3] | |
| shoes: Asics Trail | ||
| Quick run on the Gooseberry Spring trail on Mt Taylor. Mami hiked and my dad mostly stayed behind and tried not to hyperventilate. He was worried about the possibility that he might miss the beginning of the ND game. Really nice trail, though I lost it at some point after crossing a little valley of cows. Found it on the way back, so now I can go back and finish the ascent some time.
Mt Taylor is pretty awesome. It seems like there's a lot of terrain possibility out there, but I think it's logistically tough. I've never done a rogaine, so perhaps I am unqualified to say so, but it seems like it would make awesome rogaine terrain. Nothing like a blown out volcano for sweet views. | ||
Friday Nov 24 | ||
| Hiking 1:00:00 [1] | |
| shoes: Asics Trail | ||
| Took the tram up and hiked with mami from the upper tram terminal to the Crest House via La Luz and Crest Spur. This hike was made possible by my courageous father, who had no desire to dangle from a cable for 15 minutes. He drove all the way around the mountains and up the other side to meet us at Crest House.
Slow going - mami felt the altitude, plus it was the more strenous of the two possible routes. Lot more people out there today than the last couple times I was up there. Nice day, low 30s and sunny. | ||
Thursday Nov 23 | ||
| Note | |
| Turkey Trek 5k | ||
| Running race (road) 24:09 [4] 5 km (4:50 / km) +60m 4:33 / km vdot: 39.9 | |
| slept:8.0 shoes: Kayano XII (pink) | ||
| Well, that was fun. I knew this was going to be tough, but it was harder than I expected. The first mile and a quarter were up about 60m (and through hundreds of walkers... argh!), then turned back around, and the final push was flat, finally finishing around the track. I underestimated just how slow I'd be on the up and, even worse, underestimated how fast I could go back down. I don't know if the altitude (about 6000') is significant over a short race like this, but I sure hope so because this course certainly kicked my butt.
mile splits: 8:27 7:40 7:07 :55 On the plus side, it was a beautiful ( but cold) morning and they had the coolest opening of any race I've been to. They had a hot air balloon with the operator (pilot?) holding a flag. He launched the balloon at the start of the anthem and waved it as he flew up. I'm usually not a sucker for patriotic moments, but this was cool. Plus, the balloon was all Thanksgiving colored. Mami walked the 5k at a very leisurely pace. I did get her to jog to a street corner near the finish. :-) | ||
| Running warm up/down (road) 10:00 [2] | |
| shoes: Kayano XII (pink) | ||
| Mostly warm up. Not enough time running around, since mami had to stop off at Starbucks along the way to get her spiffy grande mocha 2% 16 second shot thing. I made fun of her for wearing makeup to go to a race, but she insists that it is to protect her face, and that I will end up looking like a raisin when I'm her age. To which my dad said, "Beautiful grapes turn into beautiful raisins." At least someone loves me. ;-) | ||
| C • Awwww. 2 | ||
Monday Nov 20 | ||
| Running (road) 42:05 [3] 5.0 mi (8:25 / mi) +50m 5:04 / km | |
| slept:8.0 shoes: Kayano XII (pink) | ||
| Late evening run around da hood. Couple of firsts: First time running on the roads around here and first time wearing tights since last winter. Nice and toasty with those on as it was in the mid-30s. Looks like the loop is just under 2.5 miles, which is a nice number (even if it means little extension spurs to make nice distances).
Meant to just run easy but felt a little perky. Not sure if there was any real purpose to running at this speed... maybe I could call it half marathon pace? Whatever it was, it felt really good. | ||
| Note | |
| Spent just about 3.5 hours on the UNM campus doing some secret map scouting work. The aerials are really good, I think it'll be neat. Not quite as neat was the almost toothless lady who tried to sell me valium. | ||
| Mapping 3:30:00 [1] | |
Sunday Nov 19 | ||
| Note | |
| The only thing I did today related to training was making some experimental pizza. My first try at making whole wheat dough... probably the first of many tries. | ||
| C • Ambitious! 12 | ||
Saturday Nov 18 | ||
| Orienteering race 2:11:00 [4] 7 km (18:43 / km) +400m 14:33 / km | |
| 15c slept:7.0 shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| NMO "red" at Rendija Canyon. Gorgeous day and neat terrain. This was an interesting course. Okay, it was ridiculously phyiscally demanding. Not exactly my style, but hey, I still won, beating all the fit dudes who decided on "over" instead of "around" on the penultimate leg. Silly boys.
Not a clean run, probably >12 min of mistakes. Which is really unfortunate given that this was not the kind of place where you have to watch that you don't outrun your navigational ability. There were places where you could run and had to actually navigate on the run, but most of the time out there was trudging or scrambling. The place was mapped after a fire, which meant most of the white woods were very runnable - a forest of (standing) burnt trees. Since then many of the trees have fallen, meaning that white woods are not runnable - a forest of (fallen) burnt trees. And then there's the course-setting style of "I wanted to make it a good, hard hike!" If that's what people like, then fulfill the demand, I suppose... but I like to run and for the challenge to be about navigating fast and clean. This is the first time that I've been really inspired to do some course setting. I think one could set some really neat middle style courses there that don't involve crawling over trees and scree to get out of a canyon. Map with gps route. Bad scan and the gps seems to cut out before the end. | ||
| Orienteering warm up/down 35:00 [1] | |
| shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Retrieving controls after the last of the white/yellow people were in. I thought this might be challenging because of a mother and daughter pair who came in complaining that half of the controls were in the wrong place on the yellow. Apparently the club had an issue once with a prankster moving some bags, so there was a suspicion that this had happened again. Not only were all of the controls in the right place, but they were blatantly obviously in-your-face impossible to miss in the right place. It was actually a wondefully interesting but still appropriatly easy yellow course. My favorite line, "it could be that we weren't in the right place, but I really doubt that that's the case." | ||
Friday Nov 17 | ||
| Orienteering 1:15:00 [2] | |
| shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Pranced out the Opsahl's back door to vet tomorrow's orange and just generally have a looksy at the map. Spent a long time pondering why there were .5m cliffs on the map when there were too many 2m boulders and 4m cliffs to keep straight. Hmmm. But it is very interesting terrain. And right out their back door! (Their house is on the map.)
Pranced back "home", but didn't quite make it back before it was just a wee bit too dark to read the map. Why do I keep *doing* that? | ||
Wednesday Nov 15 | ||
| Note | |
| Okay, first attempt with the day 1 map. It's not a very big image, so it's hard to see detail. But my flub at 14 and my beautiful fake-out on 8 are clearly visible.
Now also: Sprint A and Sprint B. It looks like it's possible to "share" the track and image overlay on the Google Earth community, which would make sharing maps easy (as long as people have downloaded Google Earth). And now, from the "I'm having too much fun with this" department, a little playing with the elevation features. Since this weekend was flat, I threw a map of Spooner Lake onto the terrain and exaggerated the elevation. Side view and close up. The match isn't very good, but it's fun to look at. | ||
| C • Map 14 | ||
| Running (trail) 52:00 [3] 4.8 mi (10:50 / mi) | |
| slept:7.0 shoes: Asics Trail | ||
| Went out to the west side of Petroglyph NM for a run. Nice little area and very close and easy to get to. The difference between going E/SE and W/SW from my neighborhood is like visiting a different planet. No exaggeration. Gross suburbia vs. 40 mile views in every direction, with cute little volcanoes to run around!
And, of course (!), a view of my route. | ||
Tuesday Nov 14 | ||
| Running (road) 1:37:00 [1] 8.0 mi (12:07 / mi) | |
| slept:9.0 shoes: Kayano XII (pink) | ||
| Run #2 in Seabass' "Oh shit, I have to run a half marathon in a few weeks" preparation series. We ran along the Rio Grande river path, deciding on 8 min/1 min for run/walk, which seemed to work quite well. She managed to cover all 8 miles without too much trouble, mostly moving faster than 12 min/mi, which is sort of "goal pace". I recall being way more exhausted after my first 8-miler, so this bodes well.
Really nice day in NM! | ||
| Note | |
| I had a forehead slapping moment this evening. After all of 10 minutes of tinkering I discovered how ridiculously easy it is to get tracks from my Forerunner onto an O map on my Mac. (Something I hadn't bothered to try yet other than tinkering with the Windows side.)
I used a free program called LoadMyTracks to download the data as a GPX file. Then I just opened up Google Earth and dragged the file in. This gets me tracks overlayed on the regular Google Maps view, but it's easy enough to add an O map with "Add... Image Overlay". The jpg can be moved and grown/shrunk to make it fit, and you can adjust the opacity. Pretty quick, and free! | ||
Sunday Nov 12 | ||
| Orienteering race 1:28:54 [3] *** 9.15 km (9:43 / km) +70m 9:21 / km | |
| ahr:181 max:198 22c slept:6.5 shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| So I thought that today had gone quite a bit better than yesterday. Blew the third control (3 min?) and a few bobbles, but overall felt good. And that was despite having to take off my fogged glasses after 10 controls. But looking at the splits, maybe it wasn't as clean as I thought. This is dangerous, thinking I have a good run when it isn't! Sort of deflates my good feeling. Okay, not just sort of, but really does.
Note added: Once I got home and actually looked at my map and routes... yeeeah. I had some pretty silly route choices. I guess I often went way out of my way to ride the trails/ditches. And just made some silly route execution mistakes on top that. Since I was moving the most of the time it didn't really feel like I'd made mistakes, but they're there. Basically like yesterday (~10 min?). Got Anna to Penn almost on time, and then made friends with two awesome people on the flight to Chicago. At least the weekend ended on a positive after all. ;-) | ||
| C • Cat Crap 3 | ||
| Running warm up/down (road) 10:00 [2] | |
| shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Cool down after finishing along the road back to the parking lot. | ||
Red - Splits | ||
Saturday Nov 11 | ||
| Event: BATONA 500 | ||
| Running warm up/down (trail) 10:00 [2] | |
| shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Warm up to the start. Feeling sort of spunky. | ||
| Orienteering race 1:05:53 [3] *** 6.35 km (10:23 / km) +103m 9:36 / km | |
| ahr:191 max:199 18c slept:8.0 shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Red Day 1. Sort of shaky out there. No single disaster, which I think is a victory given my experience in flat places (ie, almost none). Can't say I'm a fan of the blueberry, but at least they don't have thorns. Nice and flat, and I guess I was moving hard (check out the HR). This was pretty neat orienteering, looking forward to tomorrow.
I used my magnifier for the first time today, despite deciding not to since I'd never tried it before. I did make one "fun" mistake involving the only tree stand that I actually saw. I was aiming right to number 6 and the line goes right through a stand. When I got to the fire break near it I looked left just to see if it was visible. And it was right there! I though, "wow, I'm practially on the line, I should creep right a little more." But of course it was a totally different tree stand a couple of *hundred* meters to the right. I figured it out at the next fire break when it didn't match. Good for a chuckle, I guess. Figured when I came in that I had about 8-10 min of mistakes. With Pavlina at 51 and Peggy at 59, that would have been a very respectable result. We'll see what the verdict is later. The true triumph of the day was being the first to bingo in the AP bingo game! Yum. | ||
| Orienteering race 14:13 [4] *** 1.75 km (8:07 / km) +10m 7:54 / km | |
| ahr:183 max:195 12c shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Sprint B. I was well rested and partially refueled for this. A few mistakes, like going to 7 "on the way" to 6. And standing on the wrong side of the thicket at 5 and wondering where the control was. But it was fun, if a little scraggly. | ||
| Orienteering race 8:01 [4] *** 1.3 km (6:10 / km) +5m 6:03 / km | |
| ahr:186 max:195 10c shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Sprint A. Pretty tired by now, but this was fun and impossible to go too fast. This is clearly the fastest per km I've ever run... but I think I shouldn't set the bar with such a short course. So it will be an asterisk'd record. | ||
| Strength/Core (stretching) 5:00 [1] | |
| Right before sleepy time. | ||
Day 1 Red - Splits | ||
Sprint B - Splits | ||
Sprint A - Splits | ||
Thursday Nov 9 | ||
| Note | |
| Pictures from L a Luz. | ||
Wednesday Nov 8 | ||
| Other Cardio 10 [5] | |
| Dancin'. | ||
| C • Not yet 2 | ||
Tuesday Nov 7 | ||
| Hiking 5:05:00 [3] 14.4 mi (21:11 / mi) +1100m 10:38 / km | |
| slept:8.0 shoes: Asics Trail | ||
| My first New Mexican rite of passage - hiking La Luz. Parked at La Luz trailhead (7200'), hiked La Luz to Crest Spur Trail to Crest House (10600'). Ate lunch at Crest House. Hiked/ran back down.
Pretty neat trip, glad I could sneak it in before snow made the top nasty. Awesome views along the way. The last 2 miles are up the side of La Cueva Canyon (that's New Mexican for Caņon de la Cueva) which is shady and cool and windy. And there are something like 15 switchbacks across some nasty granite boulder fields. Trip up took 3:15, down took 1:50. Started running on the way down after popping out of La Cueva, which was safer and it allowed my cheeseburger to digest a little. So about 3-4 miles of running, but with a backpack. I'd like to *try* to run the trail up, but I'd like a companion and the ability to take the tram back down. Pics coming. | ||
Monday Nov 6 | ||
| Note | |
| Totally exhausted after the rip-roaring good time in SF. I fell asleep on the flight last night sometime between being asked what I wanted to drink and the drink (tomato juice) arriving. I never did get to enjoy my tomato juice.
Feeling a little uncentered without a class status and no idea what I'm supposed to be doing for the next month. The ARR trail run tonight will at least kick some abq life into me. Oh, and I decided to go to NJ this weekend after all. It better be fun. ;-) | ||
| C • Batona 3 | ||
| Running tempo (trail) 30:00 [4] 3.33 mi (9:00 / mi) | |
| slept:9.0 shoes: Asics Trail | ||
| Monday night trail run at the Indian School open space. Tougher crowd this week - basically all fast men, and no slow people. So I got really short rests at each stop. It was hard going, right from the get go. The "warm up" is a brutal 7 minutes or so of uphill, which I will never complain about... I spent 2 years complaining about not having hills in TX, so now that I have them it's time to suck it up and run them. ;-)
I can't help but use these as threshold-type training. I go quite hard (9 pace is a total wag... road effort under 8 pace most of the time) and get really short little breaks every 5 or 6 minutes. It only lasted for about 30 minutes of actual running, which is way less than the "runs last for about an hour" advertised on their site. It was getting dark, but still... | ||
| Running (trail) 13:00 [2] 1.3 mi (10:00 / mi) | |
| shoes: Asics Trail | ||
| Added a short little easy loop after the rest left. Still plenty of climb, but I took my time. It was, of course, dark when I got to the car. I really have to stop doing that.
Planning a long diversion tomorrow. I know that if I stay home all day I'll just sit in front of my computer and (gasp) the tv for election news. I'd rather come home late and have a reason to party. Time to do an election dance... | ||
| C • Democrat Dance 6 | ||
Sunday Nov 5 | ||
| Orienteering race 1:18:20 [4] *** 5.8 km (13:30 / km) +365m 10:16 / km | |
| 12c slept:7.0 | ||
| Day two, long-style course. Today was different from yesterday - much steeper and it was all about route choice. Most controls offered at least two significantly different routes, which is pretty neat. I definitely lost a lot more time to silly meso-route choices than to any actual mistakes.
On the first control I thought I was being clever by taking a dirt road up and around the side of a hill, approaching the control from the top instead of climbing through the terrain. But it seems I lost a minute there (I had no troubles executing the route and I was moving pretty fast). Then on the third I went over a saddle in a ridge (left) rather than contouring around (right) that meant 5 lines of unecessary climb - not sure if the right route was actually easy going and faster, but it sure looks dumb on paper in retrospect. I did have a pretty good time on the longest leg, which is definitely a take-home winning point for the day. That never used to happen. My actual navigation was solid, but it helps that it's easy to read a map when you're walking up a steep hill. There were some people running parallel towards the end of the course and I was once again reminded that I spend a non-trivial amount of time hesitating and stopping to look at the map. Pretty good result - Penny in 73+, Marie-Cat in 77+, then me. I also won a gift certificate in the random prize drawing! A lucky day. Forget to mention - Joe had two good runs on orange. We couldn't get Miranda to come, but I'll just give it a little time... | ||
Day 2 Red - Splits | ||
Saturday Nov 4 | ||
| Event: O in the Oaks IV | ||
| Running warm up/down (trail) 20:00 [2] | |
| slept:6.0 shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Warm up (15) and cool down (5) to and from the start/finish. | ||
| Orienteering race 49:23 [4] *** 4.9 km (10:05 / km) +225m 8:12 / km | |
| spiked:11/14c shoes: Integrators (Red) | ||
| Day 1 at Morgan Territory for O in the Oaks. Really quite nice terrain, and I had a nice run - probably my best effort at a left-coast club meet. Goofed the first control (~30s) then had some continual ridiculousness on the second (1.5-2 min). Snapped out of it (or into it) after that and worked the rest pretty well.
This was a middle-style course and a lot of fun. I definitely found that I was able to handle the sections where the terrain was peppered with rock detail much better than I have in other places in the past. Legs felt pretty good and I was moving well the whole time. Probably should have pushed up just a few more of the hills: the first three were Penny and Marie-Cat somewhere over 47 and Ellyn (Alaska) just 30 seconds ahead of me. | ||
Day 1 Red - Splits | ||
Friday Nov 3 | ||
| Note | |
| slept:8.0 | ||
| My glasses broke today (again), just before we started class. I squinted a lot. I think I have a "normal" backup pair and won't have to rely on a pair of BCGs for the weekend. I'm just glad they snapped today and not tomorrow!
And, in more significant news, it seems that somebody high up decided that I should not be in this training class. You know, the one I've been in for two weeks. I'm going to be in the next class, which *starts* on Nov 28th. It's not clear yet what I will be doing (no one has even officially told me this yet) but hopefully I'll have lots of time to play in the mountains. I'm just really glad that they lacked the foresight to delay me *before* leaving Texas. 
(Click for the PG rated version.) | ||
| C • class 7 | ||
Thursday Nov 2 | ||
| Running (road/dirt) 58:00 [1] 5.0 mi (11:35 / mi) | |
| slept:5.0 shoes: Kayano XII (pink) | ||
| Ran with Melissa on the Rio Grande river trail, working on the run/walk thing. We did (basically) 5 min run, 30 sec walk. Thirty seconds is not very long, I feel like if I were going to run a long race with walk breaks, I'd want to do a long enough run to give me at least a minute or two of walking... 30s just flies by. We'll see what she comes up with.
Total time out about 64 minutes - one longer walk break after about 40 minutes. I was surprisingly not tired, despite getting up at 3:30am for 7 hours of class (done by 11:30!). First run in my new shoes. Felt great. Beautiful day, 60 and sunny. The river trail, at least up here, isn't as scenic as one would expect, but it's still a lot nicer than the road. | ||
Wednesday Nov 1 | ||
| Hiking 2:00:00 [1] | |
| slept:6.0 shoes: Asics Trail | ||
| Hike up on top of the Sandias with Melissa. Original plan was to tram up for a hike and then tram down, but the tram is closed for fall mnx. So we drove all the way around to the 10k trailhead (so called because it roughly follows the 10,000' contour line, not because of its length). Took 10k south to the crest trail, up to the peak and back across and down to the car.
Not too strenuous except for the bit when we first got on the crest trail. Yikes! Going up steep stuff that high makes me feel quite out of shape. We did have awesome views from the crest, though, making it quite worth it. Weather was sweet, mid-30's until the sun went away, then it seemed to get colder quite quickly. Total time out there about 2:45. Came ridiculously close to hitting a deer on the way out. I drove very slowly the rest of the way down. Another yikes! At least now I'm tired enough to get to bed for my 3:30am wake up time tomorrow! | ||
