Training Log Archive: GrrrBear

One hour yoga with the bears, nice stretch after a weekend of orienteering.

Difficult and long course, took a little too much time getting into the course at #1 (+3) and #2 (+5) which was the longest leg of the course (long legs continue to be a weak point). #3 was better (+1) and 4 and 5 were spikes. The wheels came off at #6, (+11), I got confused by a lot of parallel features, and the denseness of the map in that area. #7 was a bit better (+6) and 8 was only +1. #9 was a spike, and #10, being another long leg, slowed me down a bit (+5). On this one I just ran the road instead of going cross country. The last four controls were spikes, better late than never! Net aggregate error was about 32 minutes, clearly not the best run! Excellent terrain and map, plus a well run meet!

This was an interesting race, it was not as technically difficult as I was expecting for some reason, probably memories of the Whistler COC middle were in my head. In any event, I was keeping it slow and conservative. Running speed was slower than usual. The error of note was at #6 where going in too low cost me at least 5 minutes. I could have also picked up a lot of time with the running.

Event: Western Canadian Championships
 

First off, never run a sprint course such as this one in conventional running shoes, must have lost a minute or two right of the bat just climbing that hill to the first control. Lost more time at #4 and #17. #4 was a classic parallel error, took the wrong path and ended up on a parallel feature, the actual control was one over, saw #5 before I got back to #4. On #17, I was just way too low, and ran into #18 before I got to #17. This probably amounts to about 5~6 min of errors!

6x hill repeats with warm up and warm down on Bridle path hill going up to Prospect point in Stanley Park.

Tempo run around the seawall, slower than usual.

Very warm 26k run over the LG bridge into North Van, drank the well dry.

Event: 2014 Canadian Champs
 

Middle distance at the COCs. Haven't orienteered for a while, so took it slowly and tried to stay in contact with the map. Conservative orienteering. Was 17th out of 27 people in my age class M55. Map was a superb technical orienteering style map, extremely well mapped, and the course was excellent. Despite my rusty navigation skills, I managed to stay out of any kind of major trouble, just made small errors that were easily recovered from. Temps were in the low 30s, and was definitely getting dehydrated near the end, will have to take my camelbak out for the WCOCs next week. Seemed to have a kind of flow thing happening, and the map was my friend :).

Middle M55 - Splits