Training Log Archive: mintore

Event: Cambridge City Race
 

Train station to start at Jesus Green

Cambridge City Race. 6.5 km/0 m

A most excellent city race! Bustling, crowded streets of pedestrians, people graduating and people taking their pictures, bikes, busses, and slow moving cars, interspersed with city parks, quads for the colleges, cool architecture, and bridges. Trying to go fast particularly on longer bits and needing to jump around people was exhilarating. Technically interesting legs with very few exceptions, and everything nicely in the correct place. Some very cool alleys, especially a narrow winding alley near the end of the course and some quite small courts hidden behind circuitous entrances.

It was a bit of a gray day with some very windy bits but the weather was good. My run was good with really only three controls that suffered from more significant errors (the largest not recognizing the correct route choice until I had gone too far to fix it, which in retrospect caused a subpar choice for the following leg. I got trapped by the messed-up flow). I am roughly guessing that a clean run for me would have been about 4.5 min faster.

C4 - 5s pause, wrong tree
C8 and C9 - these were deviously long legs connected by shortish lines, it did require one to run through the middle of King's College which was superb. The run was actually long enough and the route to C9 obvious enough that I could look at the buildings and enjoy it. It is also fun to run through the closed college past the sentries and out the gate (legally).
C10 missed an early small passageway and then missed a way to limit some of the damage later in the leg by passing through a very hard to see small gate. Sadly, I think the missed run in the first instance went through a more scenic quad. (90s)
C11 took the winding route rather than the straighter one. In retrospect, the straighter one was meaningfully shorter and set the control up better. (20s). This was the only control that really felt hidden but it was fair on a narrow strip of path wedged between a wall, path, and hedge (back to my poor setup coming from the most blind approach)
C13 chose the longer route by two parallel paths (20s)
C17 had to wait to cross the largest street (20s that felt like an eternity)
C21 had to pass a slow runner on a very narrow passage, lost contact and turned rather than stopping (15 s and some in-my-head cursing)
F just winded coming into the finish, a really hard 40s across and open lawn and I probably gave up 1-2 s
Finished one spot below half on 54 runners in veteran mens (Course 2), one second behind the closest runner (8:42 min/km).

Happy and tired (but the clocks change here tonight, win!) ; Aidan and I are going day-of to the Brandon meet in the morning.

Walk back through parts of the course, saw some of Cambridge and the market, and went to see the Eagle.

Same run as last night but alone and backwards. I thought that I was dogging it at the end so I picked up the pace but probably should have just stuck with mellow.

Comfy night run with Aidan.

Event: NOR Club Championships
 

A quick walk back to the train and down to the beach and back. A mixture of sand and rocky beaches; nicer than Yarmouth because of the pools.

Walk from train station to the event.

Norwich Club Championships Green 3.98 km

Three courses were offered. Men's was green, women's light green and the junior course was yellow.

I ran green first starting in drizzle that peaked as full rain at control 4. The course was excellent. However, unlike some of the Scottish Six Days courses where precipitation dropped in a brief spell of misery and then the day improved, this was probably my one instance in the UK where my orienteering had no redeeming qualities. My biggest single error was blowing by control 4 in the rain causing a 15 min error on a 2 min leg. The larger problem was that I over ran many controls on the 1:7500 map resulting in me being certain that I was at the wrong place most of the time. At least it didn't last too long.

Light green 3.6 km (actual distance and time estimated, Garmin was not on 0.5 km in)

Regrouped and ran the light green. Gave Aidan a 3 min headstart. We reconvened at control 2 where we took about half the same and half different route choices. We continued to meet up until the 2nd to last control and then I went on smaller trails and he took a more establshed route. I had seen a few of the controls on the green which gave me some advantage; Aidan had only seen one. Finished about 4 minutes ahead but I had to keep moving. The skies had cleared up and allowed great views from the spurs to the N. Sea off West Runton.

I think this was the fastest run of the day and Aidan's was second.

Aidan ran well on the yellow course (2.5 km, 20 min). An extremely benevolent gesture, NOR granted him honorary membership allowing him to be the club M12 champion this year. A nice end to the day.

cleared three controls with Aidan.

Map review train-ing (literally, we looked at the maps while on the train back to Norwich). Entire trip was cab-train-walk-run-walk-train-bus. All public transit and it was great. Map review was ended by a nap.