Training Log Archive: mintore

Event: NOC Regional Event
 

Parkrun #3.

Slightly fewer people but this made for less jockeying in the starting leg. Out too fast 6:40, and faded about 3 s/mile.

New PB.

4.5 roundtrips to work

Missed the bus and decided to walk. A light breeze pushing the light cool rain ensured that I would have to work hard to focus on happy thoughts.

A fall wind really whipped up tonight and there was still a bit of precip. Largish tree blew down across the trail (thankfully before we got to it). It was good running out of the wind, but it took a bit of street wind-tunnel to get there.

Away from work late on a cool, windy night. With some encouragement, Aidan led me around the park. It was nicer than anticipated.

It seemed like rain on the way out the door but the sky cleared and the evening was beautiful. Aidan and I went to the ponies and lake and then took our time picking our way through the woods in the twilight.

Single Dumpling at Sheringham Park (B meet).

Short brown course, 6.47k/280m Beautiful weather, we were all tired (before and after), and probably not well enough hydrated for the run.

This was eye-openingly hard after the past few urban races. Sheringham has moraine deposited hill & re-entrant systems that could be in Indiana or Ohio, except that the lack of water action on the land and lack of water features made it seem a bit more technically challenging (more small reenrants and often at lots of odd angles).

The course was partly a middle and partly a classic, with lots of running through moderately slow forest, some significant patches of very dense rhododendrons, and lots of bracken on some hillsides. It was clear that orienteering today would be real work as I headed down a steep hillside enroute to C2 through the bracken, hooking every second footstep in brambles, thinking that I was going to take a header, and somehow staying upright, to repeat the same group of actions at least 8 times. Found the map to be ok but some of the trails and vegetation to be a bit unpredictable (but we were warned in the notes), and I was gaining some comfort with what I could use and what I could not by the end. A bit of difficulty for C9 picking the correct spur to scour for a pit (3-4 min error) but most of my time lost was probably in the physicality of some of the hillsides and some reticence in the earlier legs. The leg to 13 was notably bruising, skirting a giant hill of fight. I chained the indistinct trails and mowed areas that I wanted together, but the route was mostly perpendicular to these avoiding the out-of-bounds, resulting in much up-and-down and poor footing (sometimes just because you couldn't see where your feet would land). As a final note, control 14 was a black x on the side of a steep hill. I was very pleased having navigated to exactly the right spot to drop over the hillside. Upon seeing the bag, I then tried to find the feature. From the map, Black X = 2 m high branch hide or small tripod. It was indeed the latter (except that the tripod was makeshift affair from a few sticks less than 2 ft high fastened together like a teepee???! (5th of 12 and better than the par time of 87:52)

Aidan ran well but found the first 4 controls on the orange to be quite challenging, occasionally changing his original route choice to get the controls to go. He finished in 1st, 32:04 on 3.08 k on 12 runners.