Training Log Archive: Kat

Various types of strength exercises and a few stretches.

My right knee started to hurt after the first day of training (March 13th) and has not gotten better since. I will try to take a few days off of running and give it time to recover. Also, I will get it checked out next month when I'm back in Oxford.

C • Knee 6

I spent some time looking at maps today, mostly Swedish ones. I am feeling more confident now about my ability to orienteer in technical terrain, despite not having done much of it since last time I was in Sweden. This is good.

Running to and from the start of the sprint from the clubhouse.

Sprint around part of the Uppsala University buildings and the surrounding hill and woods. Not especially technical, but not trivial either. I walked up the hilly legs through the snow and did the entire thing at an easy pace. I made a few mistakes, but they were at the beginning of the course where I was adjusting to the scale (which wasn't printed on the map). After that, I was doing well. Slow, but accurate.

Afternoon training session after some lunch and Tiomila talk at the clubhouse. Since my right knee was bothering me previously, I decided to walk the course. I actually stuck to my guns and did walk the majority of it, but ran the last 1.5 km or so because I was driving back with some other OK Linne guys and didn't want them to have to wait for me.

The course was mostly trails and roads because the snow was really tough to wade through, but there were still some technical parts near controls (inside the circle), especially the last few. There was also some possibility for route choice, and even while walking, I do not think I picked the optimal route choice on the really long leg to #2.

Running with Boris in Stadsskogen, looking at a map of the place and trying to make out the snowy trails - it's tough!

Doing strength exercises and some stretching with Boris after the run.

Travel day to Sweden and also a rest day to give my right knee a chance to recover, at least somewhat.

There was too much snow today to do the planned training exercises, so OUOC waded through the snow up a hill to a lake where we proceeded to throw snowballs at each other and sled down a hill on our map cases. Afterward, I ran down the hill to the minibus, very slowly to avoid slipping and falling. Sadly, my right knee was hurting even at that gentle pace.

Second day of OUOC training, this time at Docharn & Deishar. The terrain here was very hilly, but more woods and less heather. We did one long session here consisting of four different exercises.

First was a map-memory exercise, which I did with Helen. I would go to a control using compass only (and memory of the map), then she would do the next control while I followed along reading the map and studying the next leg. This was very nice since we are well-matched in speed and since I didn't make any mistakes to speak of.

The second exercise was a talk-O, which I did with Kat Asker. Basically we did a course while talking about routes, stuff we were expecting to see, what we actually saw, etc.

Then, after several minutes of walking uphill to the start, we did a downhill course. It wasn't entirely downhill, but most of the legs did include going downhill diagonally across a slope. I tried to use bearings on some of the longer legs and besides a few slips and a bad route choice to the finish, it was fine.

The last exercise was a sprint (less than 1.5 km probably) with controls being highly concentrated close to where our minibus was parked. This was unfortunate since this particular area was thinned, with cut trees and branches everywhere. Nonetheless, the sprint was fun and challenging. The controls circles were really close together and on a 1:15,000 map, this made the details rather difficult to see even while walking. With most of the controls, I would stop for a few seconds to look at the map closely, then take off. Very fun course!

First half of first day of OUOC training up in Scotland at Loch Vaa. We did a line-O (which took me about 32 minutes) through hills of heather, then split up into pairs to hang controls for the control-picking course. It took me about a third of the line-O to adjust to the map, but afterward I felt that I could understand all of the contour lines just fine. The control-pick was fun. I had some difficulties when the controls were hung too low (or ended up being blown by the wind into the heather) but in general I found everything right on. Fun day.

The second half of the training day. The first exercise was a long-legs one, which I did with Helen. She taught me how to do proper bearings and I kept practicing with this throughout the rest of the day. It is definitely a useful skill to have since this allows me to run fast through the woods on a bearing till I hit some big feature, then relocate, rather than worry about smaller features on the way that I do not necessarily have to even notice.

The last exercise of the day was an emit course which I should have done in about 30 minutes (since it was a bit over 3 km) but which I actually did in 50 minutes. I was still trying to practice taking bearings, and unfortunately, when going to #3, I only took a bearing and didn't look at the features at all, which I knew was a mistake but I kept hoping I'd spot the control anyway. But we weren't using control flags, just the emit stakes, which are rather hard to notice unless you are looking out for them. So I wound up spending almost 20 minutes looking for #3. But besides this disaster, and two other smaller mistakes, I found the rest of the controls cleanly.