Training Log Archive: Canadian

The result and performance wasn't particularly inspiring as I felt like I had no oomph in my legs for this race and I made 6:30 in mistakes but I was generally orienteering well and I did the right things to get the right start to the course which set me up to orienteer properly and get back on track when I did make mistakes. Given that that was my primary goal for the day I am happy.

Somehow despite my mediocre performance I ended up 2nd behind Jordan. He beat me by 7 minutes. Granted he knew the area very well, but 7 minutes is still a lot.

Serghei Zhuk was on target for 75 minutes before blowing up completely near the end of the course. 75 minutes should have been possible for me and I probably could have done on the day if I had set myself up properly for it with proper race preparation and different goals and a real race plan.

Anyway, because I was orienteering well I can identify exactly what happened for each of my mistakes:
1. Got into the centre of the circle but was 10m off on the wrong cliff (even more detail then was on the map) and couldn't figure out exactly what was going on. Took me too long to check a bunch of cliffs before finding the right one. *I would have told the course setter to change the control site if I was controlling.
2, 3. Good
4. Wasn't strict enough about my compass bearing and direction across the bland stuff in the middle. Lost only a little bit of time due to inefficiency.
5. Big miss here because I flipped a bunch of contours and so the terrain didn't match up come over the spur and I drifted. Should have realized something was off and stopped early and figured it out. Only figure it out way too late.
6, 7. Good
8. Good but could have tried harder to stay on my line instead of drifting because the slope and ground was easier?
9. Fine
10. Spiked.
11. Control felt like it was up one whole contour when I dropped off the side of the ridge and had to climb back up. Not sure if that's the maps fault or mine. Otherwise this felt perfect.
12. Got confused by a wall right near the edge of the map. Ultimately I didn't leave the road with a proper compass direction and hit a wall I wasn't aiming for because I was ~30 degrees off. Then saw Jordan and he helped me correct but also got into my head.
13. Chose the right route but was undisciplined and let myself climb too high.
14. good
15. Feeling like I had no speed nor ability to accelerate on the path. Didn't properly visualize the shape of the broad spur and therefore didn't notice that it should have been on the right side of it. Went left around some extra vegetation when it was clearly on the left side of the spur and control was on the right.
16. Good. Control was a little higher than the centre of the circle and I ended up on the wrong side of a fallen tree.
17. Looked down the slope out of 16 and saw a big re-entrant I didn't want to go down and climb back up. Went around but never corrected because going around wasn't part of my plan. Ended up following the wrong line of cliffs and took me too long to realise where I was and what had happened.
18. Good
F. Good.

Routegadget

Blue day 2 - Splits

Event: West Point A-Meet
 

Got an opportunity to learn some things today and do a good analysis of what makes things not work for me. I'll explain and write more later:

As I think I've mentioned on my log before my biggest problem right now is not being able to get into the right focus consistently. Sometimes when I'm not in the right focus I can still get around a course ok but more often everything derails and I make mistakes on most legs. That's what happened on Saturday. Because this was the first time this really happened since I identified this as my number one thing to work on earlier this season it is actually a welcome opportunity to study my issue.

I had a very brief email conversation with Mike Wadd a week previously about some of this and I thought I'd try going in much more relaxed without going through and writing down a plan and over-thinking things. Didn't do too much of a warm-up and didn't work on warming up mentally. I knew this was an experiment which may or may not work. It didn't. Note taken.

Here's what I wrote in my paper notebook Sunday morning:
Saturday was one of those days that didn't work:

Why not?
- screwed up second leg + convinced myself the control was in the wrong spot (map was odd in the circle)
- then screwed up 3 + 4 badly
-- lost it from there.
Why did I screw up the 2nd leg in the first place?
- I didn't have a solid plan
- I wasn't orienteering ahead of where I was
- I wasn't prepared for the physicality of a sea of blueberries
why not? [why didn't I have a solid plan and wasn't orienteering ahead of myself?]
- I wasn't orienteering ahead of where I was properly on the 1st leg
- I wasn't therefore anticipating the 1st control and didn't read ahead and plan the 2nd leg
- I wasn't in a mentally aggressive mindset on the 1st leg

Takeaways
- Don't underestimate the terrain or map / technical difficulty
- be extra careful to have a goo plan on the 1st 3 controls
- Need to start with a mindset of immediately finding the 1st leg and creating a plan and reading ahead (start with a mentally aggressive mindset!) *physically it doesn't have to be fast or aggressive.

?? Don't leave the start triangle until I have a plan for leg 1?

Blue Day 1 - Splits

Nice training on the March Highlands. Corridor orienteering with a fairly wide corridor. Felt quite smooth throughout but definitely some good take-aways:

1. use the compass more as a primary technique - especially where there is the potential for parallel errors - there were a few spots where I ended up bouncing around a bit because there were multiple features but only one was inside the corridor.


2. even on short legs there can be a small route choice element - I ran into this problem leaving controls with a control picking go straight all the time mentality when 15 seconds could have been saved by leaving in a different direction to pick a slightly smoother route around a hill. Happened a few times - need to look at the leg before I'm at the control and actually pick a route when there's a possibility for route choice.

A little bit extra with Alex and Trevor to wrap up.

Orienteering intervals. 6 control course and we were to two controls out, recovery, 1 control back, equal recovery (we sometimes skimped a bit here), and so on through the course. One person was supposed to lead and confuse / shake the other runners on the two controls out by taking a weird route, random turns, etc. while the others tried to keep up and follow along. The one back was faster than race pace orienteer as well as you can. As well as you can was pretty sloppy today with these being mass start. Only possible because we know the area pretty well and had already done the leg in the other direction. Fun and fast with Alex, Robbie, and Eric though Eric had to quit early because of a broke metatarsal (ouch).

Low quality training today -cycling to / from KRF and running around during practice and setting out flags.

A sleepy pool run at lunch time. Running on auto pilot for most of it.

Roughly 20 minutes of running throughout KRF tonight.