Training Log Archive: Kat

Easy jog with Kat M. and Ali before the start. Feeling really tired after the beer race and the little sleep I got last night, but excited about the relays.

EVENT: Varsity Match Relays at Loxley Common
COURSE: Each relay had a medium leg, a short leg, and a long leg (in that order). My team had Hedley Proctor (a JOKer) running first, me second, and Becky last. A fun team!
MY RUN: After yesterday, I was tired and the only thing I wanted to do was get around the course without making any huge mistakes. I had none of the rusty, dazed feelings from yesterday - was careful and concentrated the entire way and wound up doing quite well as a result. Felt pretty slow, but remembered from yesterday that just because I feel slow doesn't mean I am.
RESULTS: I think I started off in 9th or 10th position, but came back in 3rd. Becky had a good run on the last leg (she is impressive!) and we were the 5th team home. I think I had the fastest time on the short leg, although this isn't saying much because the fast people were mostly running medium or long.
ANALYSIS: It was cool to compare splits with Boris, because I actually beat him on a few! :)

Cool-down running after pulling an annoying thorn out of my foot. It must have gotten stuck in my sock yesterday because I felt it almost immediately after starting the relay course. Painful, but at least I was only doing 3km.

I've gotten quite a bit of advice in the past year about orienteering, but I think one of the most helpful things has been:

"Orienteering takes a long, long time to get good at, and sometimes it can be a very humbling sport even when you think you’ve got it."
- Peter Gagarin

I have this thought in mind after every orienteering race, because the more I orienteer, the more I realize how true it is. I've gotten a lot better in the past year, but I'm still very inconsistent. It helps to remember that orienteering takes a lot of time and experience to do well, and as a result I don't get too disappointed by the mistakes or too confident with the good runs. Anything can happen on a given day!

Event: Varsity Match 2007
 

Warming up before the start. I felt really tired and sluggish, not quite awake.

C • Congrats on the Oxford win... ... 2

EVENT: 2007 Varsity Match at Wharncliffe
COURSE: Women's A, 6.9 km, 250 m climb, 17 controls
TERRAIN: The organizers did not get permission for the huge open area on the east side of Wharncliffe, so the entire course was basically along one steep hillside. The woods were very physically demanding - bracken and brambles *everywhere* and rocky in areas, with a few deep streams (Ali fell up to her waist in one of them). Lots of vague features and also some patches of technical contour detail, where the map was a bit dubious.
MY RUN: Both glorious and disastrous. I hadn't orienteered for two weeks (Shotover does not count) and so I was feeling a bit rusty. I wish there could have been a warm-up map, like they have for elites at the big races. I started off kind of dazed and was a bit too far right on the first control, but realized it quickly and corrected. (I have an ugly scratch on my left hamstring now from climbing over a log to get to that first control.) Not the best beginning, but I knew that I had only lost fifteen seconds at most, so I put it behind me and got on with it. But then I missed #2 (a pit in the brambles) despite a good, nearby attackpoint and spent several minutes searching for it. Again, I forced myself to forget it and move on. But when I messed up #4 by something like 7 minutes, all of which were spent running up and down the steep brambly hillside, I knew it was going to be a bad run. [I was told afterward that Rachel Elder made the same mistake, which probably shouldn't make me feel better, but does.] I went on to make another huge mistake on #8, which I found only with Ruth's help. At this point, it was pretty hard to be optimistic because Ruth had started twelve minutes behind me, but I beat her to the next few controls and started to feel almost hopeful again (not for a good result, but for at least a good half-result) until I messed up #12 horrendously (another 7 minute error). The rest of the course was something of a blur. I was moving my body in the right direction, but I felt really and truly horrible. I was tired, I was hurting, AND I knew the result was going to be bad. If this had not been the Varsity Match, I would have DNFed.
RESULTS: I was the third scorer for Oxford, after Helen (who won the women's course in 65 minutes) and Ruth. Despite my 22 minutes of mistakes, the Oxford women beat the Cambridge women by the narrowest margin ever of exactly 4 seconds. [The score for each university is calculated by taking the top three times and adding them together.]
ANALYSIS: Looking at Ruth's splits and Helen's splits, I was faster than both of them on all of the legs except those where I made my huge mistakes. So, apparently, even though I was feeling like complete crap running through the brambles, I wasn't actually running that slowly.

C • Ahh Wharncliffe 1

Really slow cool-down jog with Ali, after lying around on the ground near the finish for a few minutes.

Easy jog on the grass on the inner and outer edges of the Iffley track, just to loosen up the legs.

Point of today's swim session was (1) to loosen up and stretch out (2) to get rid of some of my energy, so instead of hopping about I could actually relax and get some work done before going away for the weekend.

warm-up: 5x100 free easy
5x{50 free on 55, 50 back on 1:05} (not fast, but steady)
100 back/free easy
10x50 free (25 drill, 25 swim)
100 back/free easy
2x100 free (75 easy, 25 hard)
2x100 free (50 easy, 25 build, 25 hard)
100 free (25 easy, 25 build, 50 hard)
100 free (all hard, 1:24)
(When I did these 6x100, I was just swimming how I felt, with no specific goal times or recovery times. But I did take a split each time I started a 100, so I know I took about 1:55 each time including recovery.)
100 back/free easy
2x{50 fly/back, 50 back fast}
cool-down: 400 free/back easy
TOTAL: 3 km

I felt tired and satisfied after this workout - exactly the right frame of mind I want to be in for tomorrow. Now if only I could conserve this feeling through the first control. Too much energy isn't good for my navigation!

Ran up and down the left side of South Parks, taking the second uphill at a decent pace, trying to maintain good form.

C • Good Luck 2

Some fast reps at the top of South Parks on a little dirt path. I did 4x {3 fast reps with short recovery after the first two and a longer one after the third}. For some variation, I ran the first and third sets clockwise around the path and the second and fourth sets counterclockwise.
Times were:
46.3" (23" rest)
47.6" (24" rest)
47.6" (1:44 rest)
47.8" (23" rest)
50.2" (26" rest)
49.0" (1:43 rest)
49.3" (25" rest)
50.1" (26" rest)
48.2" (1:55 rest)
49.3" (22" rest)
50.8" (25" rest)
48.5"
Heart rate was usually in the mid 170s. By wearing my heart rate monitor during some of my fast runs and races, I think I've basically come to terms with the fact that, for me, having an HR of 175 means I'm working hard and an HR of 180 means I'm working as hard as I possibly can. Those numbers seem so low compared to other people's HRs, but that's just the way it is.

Jogged around at the top for a bit, then did some easy bounds back down the hill to my bike.

C • HR 4

Looked at route choice and despaired about lack of attackpoints on the men's long course (HSeE) from a 2005 French Championship event:
http://www.nose42.fr/gadget/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi?act...
Controls such as 3,4,26, and 29 are just vague and #17 is a boulder in a boulder field! I am surprised that none of the best guys seemed to mess it up, because coming down a steep hillside (or countouring around one) and looking for a distinct rock can be disastrous.
I was also surprised that #15 didn't seem to pose a problem. It is a pit on the side of a hill, with nothing to relocate off of except some indistinct trails. Perhaps the French put their orienteering kites next to the pits rather than inside them, as the Brits do?

warm-up: 5x100 free
8x50 free on 55
100 back easy
3x{50 free on 55, 100 free on 1:45}
50 back easy
4x{50 free on 55, 100 free on 1:45, 50 back easy}
(Wylie joined me for this set, so times were pretty quick - around 1:32 for the 100s, 1:30 for the last one.)
Random stuff:
4x25 free sprint with ~30 seconds recovery
2x25 free w/o breathing
50 fly/back easy
cool-down: 300 easy (alternate 50 free, 50 back)
TOTAL: 2.8 km

Lower body only because my arms felt pretty sore while swimming.

I like Sandra's idea of making ankle strength and related stability exercises a separate category.

Concentrated on finding safe route choices and good attackpoints:
http://folk.ntnu.no/oysteios/kart/1999/pages/1999-...
I can see why even good orienteers messed up control #8. It's tough. One of those legs where you know you can't overshoot by too much (because of the river) and you aren't very likely to run too far up or down the hillside either, but the control is still difficult to find. I wonder if trying to stay higher on the hillside towards the end of the leg and then coming down the trail near the control would have worked.

An evening run by myself. I was planning to run in the Parks, but was too late (the gate was closed), so I ran down to the track instead and did about fifteen minutes of various running drills (bounds, strides, high knees, etc.) on the grass there. The dark and the rain didn't bother me so much (even after stepping into some deep puddles), but the pavement did. My right shin *really* hurt, probably as a result of Saturday's racing. This makes me think that maybe I shouldn't do Teddy Hall relays in 8th week.

After four weeks, I finally have internet connection in my room again! So now map study can be resumed. I will attempt to do this several times a week and will try to make a note of it (whenever I remember to do so).

Today I looked at route choice:
http://folk.ntnu.no/oysteios/kart/1999/pages/1999-...
The thing that stands out, to me at least, is that Øystein often goes off the straight line to follow the open marshes. I wonder if he does this simply because they are very obvious features or whether these marshes are dry and very runnable, like the ones in Gotland.

C • or... 6

Felt really tired/sluggish today.
warm-up: 5x100 free
6x50 free on 55
400 free
5x50 (25 fly/drill, 25 back}
250 free/back easy
TOTAL: 1.7 km