Training Log Archive: Ollie

Finished the survey of QMUL with a final 6 ha, working through the main part of the campus, where the faculty buildings are located.

Wandering around the Westfield Student Village and the Library Quad. Surveyed a further 3.5 ha. Really exciting area, this will be the core of the race. The only remaining part to survey is the more built up section of the college.

Not sure what features to include on the sprint map - whether to include none/some/all benches, seats, pillars lampposts and security masts. These generally make great control features, but there are an awful lot of them.

Surveyed the Terraced Gardens in Mile End Park, and the graduate cottages and Westfield Way area in the QMUL campus - 6 ha. The former is not as intricate as the other parts of the park I surveyed yesterday, thank goodness. Security is going to be a real problem in this section though - it is a bit grim. I'm beginning to think that a manned control here might be a bit risky - for the person doing the manning.

Interestingly though, I spotted a (very subtle) permanent orienteering control marker, a very small symbol with code on the back of a post.

QMUL was a complete contrast. Lovely section right beside the canal, ridiculously intricate in places, and all of it very shiny and new.

Field survey - walking around the Arts Park and the Ecology Park in Mile End Park - 14 ha. Both areas were far more complex than I had anticipated, and generous use of "Rough open with Scattered Trees" (or "ROST" on my annotations) is going to have to cover large areas.

SLOW Trail Challenge around the suburbs of Ham Riverside (between Kingston and Richmond). Good planning meant there were plenty of route choices and the field soon split up. I made a couple of poor route choices (that lost me 20 seconds and 40 seconds respectively) and one great one (that gained me a minute) so finished 7th overall out of almost 70 finishers. There were around 10 people right behind me at the last control - including Paul N - so I went hard to the finish. Got well beat by Owen though.

There was a big hill (30m) about half-way through - most of the course was flat, but this was definitely the crux of the race and a real battle to get up.

GPS distance was 10.4km with just 40m of climb. I have a "proper" 10km on Saturday, I certainly hope to improve for this - I am aiming for a sub-42 minute time.

Cycle from home to Ham, via Clapham, Richmond Park's Robin Hood Gate and Kingston. Not including stopped time.

Running Men's Open at the first Stockport Town Race, up near Manchester. Originally I had planned to combine this with a day of cycling yesterday to support a friend doing the Land's End to John O'Groats cycling. But I missed the train for that, so ended going up just for this.

There was a strong breeze and it felt more like November than late June, but the rain held off, and I got around the course OK - running pretty fast, in fact. I followed the crowd on an inefficient route to the first control - a real trap, made worse by the control circle obscuring a crucial wall - but had a generally smooth race after that. One 90 degree error took me 200m off the line I should have been taking, but I quickly fixed it, and I overshot small turnings a couple of times, but no significant time loss.

The race format was a little unusual - hourly mass starts, and a multi-control loop in the middle where half the runners went one way and half the other way. Towards the end, the course went out from the built-up centre of the town, several long legs looping around an estate to build up the distance, before a final, rather spectacular dash down the main shopping street.

Also interesting was that the control placement was generally designed to be very spectator friendly. Unfortunately there wasn't much interest I could see from passers-by, perhaps due to the inclement weather.

Finished 6th out of 27 finishers. Nick ran away with the top prize again, finishing nearly nine minutes clear of me, and over three minutes clear of second place. I think 3rd or 4th place for me would definitely have been possible if I had had a completely mistake-free run.

According to my GPS, I ran 9.5km and climbed 245m. On that basis, I'm very pleased with my time indeed! Roll on the Dysart Dash 10K next weekend!

[Update: Looking at my GPS data, I believe I actually took 37 seconds less, as we started slightly later than the half-past that the start was timed at. More of an issue than it might be because previous mass-start runners may not have had the same problem, and someone beat me by four seconds.]

Cycle from Stockport to Glossop. Original plan was to follow National Route 62 and 68, but got distracted by a cycle tunnel and came off the route by mistake. So went along various roads and then up (and down) a big hill, before rejoining the route, and then leaving it again to take a hilly but scenic road, dropping into Glossop proper.

Quite a few steep gradients, steeper than what I'm used to in SE England!

Time is moving time, in total I spent three hours - so a good hour for pauses, map checks and breaks.

SAX Trail Challenge at Knole Park, organised by Nick B, held as a mass start race in the evening. I'm not a great fan of Knole Park because of the nettles and bracken it tends to have at this time of year, but I really enjoyed the course this time around, the weather was nice (sunny, not too hot) and there were plenty of deer and good views to keep the course interesting. I ended up running 10.3km - 25% longer than the straight-line distance, which is considerable for a non-urban area.

I finished fourth, behind Tim Br, Ed C (who won last year) and Paul N. For much of the route I was just behind SJG - I only got past her after she made a mistake on the approach to No. 7. It was a bit of a sprint for the finish, as I overtook someone right at the final control. My own big mistake was from 2 to 3, where I failed to make sense of the map. Aware of a large number of people behind me, I didn't plan the route properly, and went very wrong. The route from 7 to 8 wasn't great either, as it necessitated climbing a very high gate. And on the approach to 6, I took a round-about route, avoiding an only small dip, which lost me 20 seconds.

(N.B. The height is my own estimation based on my route, the distance is straight-line.)

Tracing Cubbitt Town - the south-eastern part of the Isle of Dogs, for the OpenStreetMap project, in the evening, using my Garmin GPS and manually annotating on the map - quite a step back from the Trimble GeoXT I use for work! Afterwards, met up the other six OSMers who made it, in a nearby pub, for a curry. Details.

The segregation and the gap between rich and poor is quite shocking when you see it for yourself, as you do around Canary Wharf.

SAX District Event at Mote Park, Maidstone. Ran Brown. Quite an informal event and low attendance - even though it was a nice, sunny day. Mote Park has an awful lot of nettles and undergrowth at this time of year, but good planning made the most of the park, including a couple of long legs where you had an either/or choice around the large lake that dominates the map.

Had a generally good run. I was very stiff at the start, having not warmed down properly after yesterday's 5K. (A large night out last night won't have helped either.) So my first couple of legs were a little slow. No significant navigational mistakes except in the short intricate wooded section from 14-16 where I messed up all three, and excessive undergrowth prevented me from getting directly to 8 and 9.

I'm pleased with my time. There were no results listed at the event but I think it's a good, potentially winning time. [Update - I was 4th, out of 16 runners. The winning time was 47:46, but I was only 47 seconds from second place. Of note, I was the only M21 - one M35 and the rest >40!]

HRavg a little high as I didn't start recording until after the first 650m. Actual distance run was 9.4km, a significant premium over the straight-line distance due to that lake.

200th Bushy Park Time Trial. It's been a while since I did one of these. Forgot to take my Garmin GPS/HRM so didn't know the time until the official results came out. Surprised I hadn't beaten 20 minutes as I thought I went quite fast.

Bushy Park now runs in reverse, with the big long 1km straight first. I found the start quite crowded - it took maybe 5 seconds to cross the line, and quite a lot of crowding for the first 30 seconds or so. I pushed a little too hard in the final kilometre - there was some guy breathing down my neck for this last section, making a horrible noise, which was annoying. Felt the lactic acid and eased up slightly with 400m to go, to get rid of him. Finished 53rd out of 200 runners. No freebie for the 200th anniversary (the main reason that got me out of bed early these morning) and also, annoying, no free drinks at the finish anymore. This is unfortunate!

Ran Blue course at a HAVOC local event at Thorndon North Country Park, near Brentwood in Essex. Had a generally clean run, with only a couple of mistakes and poor route choices, wasting maybe a minute each - in both cases, I overshot the control by around 100m. Could have gone faster, definitely, but held back as it was pretty hot and muggy. I was expecting the course to be an undergrowth nightmare, based on my previous runs here, but the course planning was good and avoided the worst of the nasty stuff. The section north of the main road was particularly pleasant - I was pleased that a good section of the course went through here.

Came joint second, behind Ian H. Certainly could have won if I'd put a bit more effort.

Final initial survey for the City of London map - completed the Minories and Smithfield areas, and looked at the newly opened South Churchyard at St Paul's Cathedral.

The map extent is now 100% COMPLETE (apart from a possible northern extension to the Broadgate Tower - by no means certain that it will be open for October though.)

Next stage is initial course planning, and starting to tidy up the map and check construction sites that may have finished since the initial survey. Crucially, the "base map" will now be the completed orienteering map.