Training Log Archive: catherineols

Nothing done all week. I feel kinda bad about it. But this math project has taken all my spare time... and my shins REALLY need the break. They're still in super-mega flare-up mode.

(carrying heavy math textbooks in my backpack probably isn't helping ><;;)

Give it another week maybe they'll die down? =S

C • Best of luck with the shin ... 1

Shins seem to hurt no matter what I do. I ran more in Texas than I used to at A-meets (navigation used to slow me down more)... then I went around in non-supportive shoes last week to save my blister... plus pilates last week seemed to inflame them even more.... and then I went and ran on Saturday. Um, bad idea.

This is a pretty serious "flare-up" incident. Even my nightly calf stretches are prohibitively painful on my shins, which has never happened to me before. Seems like I'll just have to lay low a while.

THANK YOU EVERYONE who have made these past four WIOL years so awesome.

Thank you Holly for introducing me to the sport after that fateful conversation at soccer practice one afternoon.

Thank you Tori for being such an amazing teammate and companion as we both progressed from total rookiehood to where we are today.

Thank you Kelsey, Marissa, and Anna for putting up some fierce competition and spurring me on to perform my very best, but also for being awesome people and great friends.

Thank you Drew, William, and Max for being such amazing travel companions to Texas this year (and, yes, great Canasta opponents/partners as well =P) in addition to all else you do for this team.

Thank you Claudia for not only being a great competitor and awesome Canasta partner, but also for brightening up the lives of all of us this year. You will be missed by all.

Thank you Arianna and Callie for sticking with the sport so long, even though the rains were hard and the trails were muddy. Orienteering needs more folks like you.

Thank you to the rest of the Lakeside orienteers, especially this year's crop of AMAZING new recruits. Annie, Laura, Greg, Logan, Spencer, Steven, Wesley - you are all amazing! Keep the legacy alive! <3 <3 <3

Thank you to everyone else I met as a result of my time in WIOL and Interscholastics - Alison (<3 love ya!) , Matej, Tracy, Lance, Michael, Ryan, Katherine, Hilary, Ethan, Huw, Amos, I'm sure I've forgotten someone - for making orienteering feel like not just a sport, but more like a family for me.

Thank you to my patient, patient father, for driving me to meets, and standing in the rain waiting for me, and bringing me dry clothes and a sandwich when I returned, and paying airfare for me to gallivant about the country on my various A-meet escapades, and generally making it possible for me to be a part of this sport.

Thank you to Mike Schuh for showing me the ropes way back on that first rainy afternoon at Fort Casey, for telling awesome stories, for poking fun at me for not reading my map, for giving me an excuse to exercise my Swedish, and just generally being a great mentor to me.

Thank you to ALL the Cascade adults and mentors who have encouraged me in various ways to be my very best. Jim, Eric, Sally, Jennifer, Sue, Rick, Eileen, Patrick, and Jana to name a few.

There is still the Ultimate O' series, and the Street Scrambles, and NWFF coming up. But my time in WIOL is over, and so another chapter has begun.

Thanks for everything you've done for me. I love you all. <3 <3 <3

(P.S. This list keeps growing as I come up with new people I should thank who have some connection to WIOL... please forgive me my prolixity...)

C • Woo! I got a shoutout! 19

Event: Western States + Intercollegiate Championships
 

My blister survived without causing undue pain! Hurrah for gauze, tape, and double-layered synthetic socks!

A very disappointing run - kept cutting through Texas-style, made some silly errors, and got a huge stomach cramp on the long leg. But not a bad time for me... meaning if this HAD been a non-crappy run, my time would have been better-than-average... thus I'm improving =)

There was some possibility of biking with Kelvin today, but instead I taught him to play Canasta, so oh well, just more energy saved up for WIOL Champs tomorrow morning? I had also been hoping to do some yoga yesterday, but I finished and proofread my Presidential Scholars app instead. Oh, life, how you get in the way of exercise. But I've been keeping up with nightly stretch'n'strength pretty well so far, ftw!

Also.... this blister REALLY hurts when I walk even a few steps in normal shoes no matter how I bandage it.... so god knows how it'll cope with running tomorrow.... but whaaaaaatever, if I could run on it raw for my best race ever last Sunday, I can surely run on it partially-healed tomorrow for a decent result ><;;

Haha. Hahaha. It's official: there really is nothing like a workout video to make a person feel *ridiculous*.

But, then again, there is nothing like an inability to wear shoes (due to this annoying blister) to make any other normal exercise options impossible.

Do I feel toned and sculpted? Hah, no. But I feel less like a total couch potato, and a little less depressed about not being able to leave the house in any shoes besides sandals.

Blister looking much better. Perhaps actually able to wear real shoes tomorrow? Likely some biking... we'll see.

Trying to get into the habit of nightly stretch/strength. Strength consists of calf raises, toe taps, wall sits, and planks.

Stretch consists of two calf stretches which my podiatrist suggested.

Back from interscholastics. It was AWESOME. More later once routegadget is up. I'll do all the posting-and-summarizing in one shot. Yeah.

C • GREAT WEEKEND!!!! 2

Walking the dog with my mom today. It was a beautiful day, and if it weren't for this AWFUL, raw, inch-wide, oozy blister I have on my right heel, I would have gone biking or running or something. But I can't wear normal shoes as is, and most sandals irritate my shins if I walk in them, so instead I sat around the house moping that it was so beautiful outside until my mom convinced me to throw on some pseudo-flip-flops with tabi socks and walk the dog. My shins aren't too happy with me... but it's such a beautiful day! What can you do?

Definitely the fastest race of my life. I was the very last start, so I already knew that Alison had run in 54:42 including a few bobbles. I knew I could make it in 50 minutes if I ran totally clean. Then right before I left I heard a coach on a walkie-talkie mention Claudia's time at 44-something... and off I went on my course. Talk about pressure!

It was a good thing, though, because I was constantly aware that "every second counts". Physically and mentally I pushed myself the hardest I ever have in an orienteering race. I forced myself to keep moving, never to pause but to read on the run, plan ahead, pay attention, use every spare second to prepare for the next control, and if I got lost not to walk/ponder but to run while I relocated (not something I usually do), and if I was tired to take only a few steps walking then to start jogging again. I honestly can't say I've ever put as much effort into a race or held myself to such high expectations.

It wasn't my cleanest race. I set off at the wrong angle towards 1, took a while finding 4, took a few stabs to find 8, and completely overestimated the distance to 12. But given that I was definitely pushing myself to the high end of my navigation skills, I'm *very* surprised I didn't mess up on a grander scale.

I'm very proud of my route to 7, and the "just keep moving" attitude I took through the rest of the controls.

Another 3rd place run, behind Claudia and Tori, and right in front of Holly (who, granted, had an 8 minute error to end up there.. but still!), Alison, and Anna Urbanova. Never mind the massive blister I came away with - it was well worth it. No pain, no gain, eh?

(Also, look, ma, I broke 10 mins/km in an A-meet! w00t!)

Another very fun race, and fairly clean for as fast as it was, though again, not at my maximum speed.

Two main issues here. One was a very poor route choice to 10, compounded with an even worse execution (I ran north along the fence then cut in to find the trail, but wasn't sure where on the trail I was - I should have just run east to the fence once I realized I had lost contact). I also misinterpreted the yellow surrounding point 13 as white forest (um, what? I should know what yellow stands for by now) and so spent a little while searching around the forest for a point that was in the clear. Great.

Holly started perhaps 12 minutes after me, so my goal was for her not to catch up. If it weren't for some problems grabbing the wrong CD's at the start (no, Catherine, ISVF does *not* run Green) and wasting a few minutes going back, she wouldn't have caught me. But because of the mess-up, she slipped in front of me at point 13 and so I yelled "HOLLY!! NOOOOO!!! DAMN YOU!!" and chased her pell-mell through the last controls with total reckless abandon. I definitely gained several seconds that way. Huzzah!

My dramatic panting-and-wheezing finish was made all the more dramatic by the blood-streaked scratches covering my right arm. I slashed into some wait-a-minutes on my way from 11 to 12 and my arm started bleeding pretty badly. Thank you, paramedics, for helping me clean that up!

3rd place, behind Claudia and Holly. A very successful result, and great impetus to do even better the next day.

Event: Interscholastic Champs
 

Interscholastics - Sprint A

A fun course, and a very good warmup. I definitely appreciate having some kind of competitive course (ie not just a model) before the actual event so that I can iron out all the kinks in a real, under-pressure situation.

Definitely could have run it faster, but no real errors other than that. Route choices were also fairly straightforward, though I went a little out of my way to point 10. Glad I saw the shore route to 11.

29th place out of 98 runners, right behind Claudia and Alison - not too shabby!

Sprint A - Splits

Super-late night last night - the kind I usually pull about twice a semester when there's a large project I don't make time for during the week because I realize only time pressure will get me to do it effectively. This time it was a story for fiction writing.

The end result was usual level of perkiness up until about noon or 1 o'clock, then a superlative "crash", including throbbing headache and pulling my coat over my head on the bus ride to block out sound and light.

Ehhhhh. I'm a wimp when it comes to sleep deprivation. Which is why I don't do it to myself that often.

So I didn't work out yesterday. Instead I lazed around the house, ate tylenol, finished my work, and went to bed.

C • this is good training... 1

C • good luck in Texas! 1

I was going to go to the club for some elliptical work, but decided, nah, I can do elliptical at school during the week, why not swim? Well, it's been a long time since I last did laps (a year, maybe?) so I got tired really fast, had to take a lot of breaks, etc. I'm also really bad at breathing enough... and I'm sure my form is really wacky... but yeah, it was alright. Good to mix it up a little, but probably not as efficient a workout as the other stuff I do.

200 m breaststroke
200 m crawl
400 m alternating each lap
200 m backstroke
50 m butterfly (just for the heck of it)

C • swimming... 2

Away in Blaine for a math competition yesterday and today, so no training. A shame, really. I don't like seeing three blank days in a row in my log. Bike tomorrow? Well, perhaps I don't have a whole hour to spare, but there'll be *something* at least.

(Attackpoint is SUCH a motivator! =D)

C • "(Attackpoint is SUCH a mot... 1

Resistance 2-3-4-ish, varying elevation/slant/thingo, ca 160 paces/min, but the clock on the elliptical was seriously messed up so both the time and the pace are estimates.

Very busy week this week, so decided to multi-task - it's LSP, "long slow productivity!", ie, 50 mins on an elliptical while reading about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem for an upcoming math project. Uh, can you say, nerrrrrd? But... it was useful, I read like 20-30 pgs don't remember, and got a workout in, (not to mention practiced thinking clearly while running, reading while running, etc) so hurrah!

C • Nice training session! 1

Training at Hamlin thanks to Eric Bone. The time is a total guess.

Ran the first part of the Contours course but quickly realized that was a bad idea for my shins and finished the rest walking. Also walked the Fences course as a memory O' just for something else to do, but it wasn't really very helpful.

Saved a copy of the Easy-Hard course for later, since it seems like it would be great practice once I can run again.

Eric suggested hill walking as a non-running training method. Perhaps you'll see some hill walking in my training log in the next two weeks?

C • That's an interesting idea ... 2

WIOL 7, Fire Mountain

Since Bridle Trails had gone so splendidly for me last time, and I knew that Fire Mountain was also a well-trailed map, my clearly stated goal for today was to have a Bridle-Trails-like run.

To explain, Bridle Trails did not allow off-trail running, so each leg consisted of "where am I going, what trail is it on, how will I know I'm *there* on the trail, and how do I best get to that trail from here?". Then, of course, it was a straight trail run... meaning those 3 minutes could be spend doing it again for the NEXT leg, and the one after that, and the one after that. This really helped with my through-control flow, and meant I didn't lose even 5 seconds deciding between two forks of a road - I had decided everything beforehand.

I definitely achieved my goal today. I was able to plan well ahead, and kept a steady flow through the entire course with very few actual pauses in stride to navigate. Towards the end I was actually so tired from running without navigation pauses that I had to walk some paces to catch my breath, not to read the map at all.

I gotta say I'm very proud with this one. It was brilliantly clean, and what's more, it was FAST! I've definitely worked hard for this. What a joy it is to reap the rewards in such a concrete form.

Biking with William after school.

Got a little dark towards the end, but only because we stopped for ~10 mins to call 911 to the aid of a very drunk man who was having trouble walking and fell repeatedly - we were afraid he would injure himself if someone didn't help him out. That was an interesting experience.

The ride was nice - down to Greenlake and back.

And non-impact to prepare for WIOL tomorrow!

C • Sounds fun! (except for the... 1