Training Log Archive: HGaston

I didn't fit a run in today, because Erin came over from Santiago and so I went to Valparaiso with her and Mike. She's doing her research project on Pablo Neruda, and so we visited his old house in Valparaiso. It's a museum now, and it's pretty neat. Way up in the hills with a view of the ocean and the ships below.

We also ran into a small museum of musical instruments from all over the world, including a lot of instruments from the native tribes here.

We were going to visit an old graveyard that's supposed to be interesting, but after climbing an extremely steep and narrow staircase up a hill between buildings, we came out on a dusty and empty dirt road...the graveyard wall was in front of us, but there were metal spike things along the top and some graffiti further down the wall said 'gringo go home'...so we decided not to press the issue and went back to town :-).

Dennis, the "dad" in the family I´m staying with, showed me a good place to run! It´s a 10-15 minute run to get there from the house, but then there´s a park that goes straight up a hill.

It´s nice to run where there isn´t a bunch of traffic. I didn´t explore very much of the park today, just went up a mountain of stairs and then ran hill repeats on a short loop trail.

7x 33-35 second hill repeats with recovery running downhill in between.

He also said there´s a horse track closeby where (I think!) he meant I could do trackwork.

C • YAY!!! 6

Mapwork:

Catching Features. 3 courses, with second runs on most of them. CF is getting a little easier, and I actually managed to relocate once :-).

Short run...it was getting dark. This is two segments stuck together because I stopped at the grocery store in between.

It´s nice to stay with the family, but it´s a little frustrating for running since the beach trail is about 30 minutes away on foot and there´s no way I can get there before dark except for days when classes don´t start till late (like tomorrow!). There doesn´t seem to be anywhere else to run that isn´t clogged with pedestrians.

That said, the 3´s were less crazy today, possibly because I didn´t attempt to give them colored pencils...their worst was trying to eat the glue sticks and then this one kid was standing on a chair looking out the window when another kid pulled the chair out from under him.

And I made the mistake of giving one of them a piggy-back ride at ´recess´, and then they all swarmed and wanted one and the first one kept jumping around asking for other stuff. Yikes. I don´t think this is my forte.

I had a long break in between ´classes´, so I went back to Viña and went for a run along the beach.

My watch was being questionable and then the battery died, but this should be about right.

Mapwork:

Routes/visualization on a 2005 Barebones map.

C • JWOC mapwork 3

Working during most of the light hours today, but will be able to run tomorrow.

Schedule is figured out for the escuela de lenguaje, but not sure what I´ll be doing at the escuela de arte yet.

...I´m working with *very* little kids at the escuela de lenguaje. The five-year-olds are really sweet, but the 3-year-olds son monstruos locos! ;-)

C • the age of reason... 9

Moving in with a family this afternoon so internet might be out for awhile; not sure yet...

C • woah! 9

Run-walk from the new house to the center of Viña and back. I stopped to get a chocolate bar and add cell phone minutes, then got turned around and had to relocate!

The family´s super nice, and there´s another volunteer named Mike staying here. He´s working at a vineyard and has been here since January.

Mapwork:

Routes on a map from the JWOC ´07 spectator races.

...this was going to be a map interval run.

The first 8:30 or so were slow, and it's the time running from my place to the beach trail...reading the map some, warming up, occasionally stopping at intersections--some of the intersections are cut out of the time and some aren't.

Then I was planning to alternate hard and easy intervals of 2-3 minutes, reading the map on the easy segments and visualizing them on the hard segments.

I did this, but not as many intervals as I'd planned and the intervals also weren't nearly as fast as I'd planned--I think I ran this workout too close to lunch, and I didn't feel very well during it. I'd like to run it again later in the week.

Ran with the Etappe 1 map from SOW 2006 (the Gornergrat map). It's a tricky semiopen area with scattered rocks, and it was good practice to try to read the detailed contours on the run.

Random: there are a ton of dogs here, and they just wander around or sleep on the sidewalks. I haven't seen any dead dogs in the streets though, and everyone drives really fast here and there don't seem to be many rules. Maybe these dogs are smarter.

C • hello 2

Mapwork:

- Studied the Passo Ceredo middle course (JWOC training map)

- Catching Features (re-did the four intro courses...because Catching Features is very much not my forte :-)...especially manipulating the map efficiently.)

I probably won't be able to orienteer until the JWOC training camp, so I'm going to try to do a lot of armchair mapwork, Catching Features, and map runs/intervals.