Training Log Archive: ebone

I feel quite sore today, but not so much that it's hard to walk or go up and down stairs. Since this was a longer race distance than I'm trained for, I paced myself pretty conservatively, and I had a fair amount in my legs at the end.

USARA Champs; navigation time trial. I took my time plotting the course, which involved drawing lines and measuring distances at various bearings. The course allowed a fair amount of running on roads and faint trails, but there was enough cross-country travel that my legs still got even more chewed up by the palmetto. I took my time but still made one significant (5-10 minute) mistake. Fortunately, I was able to relocate in-situ. I ended up with the second fastest time for the course.

USARA Champs; second bike. We had one big (about 30-minute) time loss, but otherwise we did fine.

USARA Champs; second paddle. The river was onobstructed, so we made quicker progress through this section. Also, our boat had a broken thwart, so the organizers let us take a faster boat.

USARA Champs; score-O at Lettuce Lake Park, using a simplified and stylized map that I had a lot of trouble getting into, because some features were smoothed whereas others had added bends that didn't exist. After taking an unmapped trail and blowing by one control, I relocated and went back for it, after which everything went smoothly.

USARA Champs; second part of second paddle, from Lettuce Lake Park back upstream to the finish. My arms felt profoundly tired at this point, probably in large part because I used my SRS wing paddle for this race, and I almost never train with it.

Raced the USARA Adventure Racing National Championships with Tom Smith and Sara Pragluski. We had a pretty good performance, all things considered.

The course consisted of:
1. trekking
2. paddling (with lots of little portages in the middle)
3. biking
4. trekking
5. time trials, where the team members split up; I did the nav. course (on an aerial photo); Tom biked and Sara ran.
6. biking
7. paddling
8. mini-orienteering (score-O at a small park)
9. paddling

I didn't have a split watch, so the logged time for each segment is a guesstimate. I'm waiting for the splits to be posted.

Here is my detailed course run-down:

TREKKING
- Start: we ran off a few seconds late, so that I could finish plotting the first few points; this made for excellent, unobstructed team photos, since we were by ourselves.
- Token collection checkpoints at polar coordinates from points X, Y and Z; we had moved up through most of the pack at this point.
- SCP1; we bushwhacked across to it; I went across the river on a log to get this one; less wimpy racers splashed across on foot.
- SCP2; our plan was to check out the "river crossing" and decide whether to bushwhack on the far side or take the trail on the near side and swim; I thought the crossing would be a bridge, and we got momentarily turned around toward TA3; when we ran back and saw the rope bridge and the waiting racers, we kept going along the riverside trail and swam across; we hooked up with the M.O.A.T. teams at the "primitive campside" checkpoint.
- SCP3; we tucked in behind M.O.A.T. for this short leg; we missed a faint road junction but it only cost us a minute or two; this checkpoint was on the far end of a marsh.
- SCP4; we continued trailing behind M.O.A.T., then we hit the mud and Sara lost a shoe twice and Tom lost one once. The CP was on an oak and vegetation boundary a bit off a road bend.
- SCP5; we bushwhacked North across a marsh out of SCP4, hit a trail/road, went to the second junction, and took a compass bearing across an open area to the edge of the cypress swamp; Sara had something in her shoe, but we decided to move away from the CP before taking care of it; I think a few minutes later she said it went away by itself.
- SCP6; from SCP5, we went back to the road we had left and continued East; about half way to SCP6, we somehow turned right onto an unmapped parallel road, but after stopping for a minute, we turned left and got back on course; we took a compass bearing and missed the CP to the right; after I decided we had gone too far, we saw DART on our way back; then we found a mob scene at the CP; Sara went to punch.
- SCP7; this was a 300m compass shot through the marsh; I was careful with the bearing, but we missed wide to the left; I'm pretty sure that this was because SCP6 and/or SCP7 were mapped a bit off; it was obvious that we had missed when we hit the fence/property line, and it was a short bounce back into the bush to bag the CP.
- SCP8; we went East out to a trail, then we ran the trail around before cutting right/South to a big clearing; despite my pace counting, we missed to the far side, so I suspect a bit of trail mapping error here; on the plus side, we had seen an unmapped trail leaving the clearing, and we took it out of there.
- SCP9; we ran the trail behind DART, then when we were really near the TA, Robin Benincasa directed us across a bridge, despite the fact that the CP was on the same side as we already were; so we crossed and crossed back, and crossed again to get to the TA, apparently in 4th place in a tight race.

PADDLING
- CP1; we headed upriver to this one, which was under an observation platform near a rapid; we pulled our boat up, I jumped out, then I called for Tom and Sara to come with me, to comply with the team separation rule; other teams did not observe this.
- CP2; this was the long haul, which included all the portaging and hucking the canoe over logs in the 17 Runs; after the river opened up again, we saw teams going to CP3 as we approached our left turn up Flint Creek to CP2.
- CP3; this was a short backtrack, then up the inlet to the manned CP at the dock in the park
- CP4; this was a short paddle to a side channel, where we pulled the boat out and went through pretty open forest to the CP - CP5; another short paddle followed by a run uphill into a vast clearing for the CP; Tom turned his ankle pretty badly here
- TA2; we saw a gator just outside the TA

BIKING
- CP6; the CP was just a few minutes from the TA in a "seasonal depression" right by the trail, but some teams still rode right by it; I think Sara spotted this one; for some reason, Sara or Tom spotted all the checkpoints, even though I was supposed to be navigating.
- CP7 was on the edge of the bike hike/swim under the powerlines.
- CP8; we rode about 1 1/2 miles of sandy, braided horse trails to get to this CP, which was the same as CP4.
- CP9 was the same as CP3, and we got there via a trail along the fence next to US Hwy. 301.
- CP10 was a long haul, the first couple of miles of which were paved; some of the dirt roads were very muddy; we were passed on the roads by a team that we later passed on the muddy roads, when the woman seemed to be bonking; I missed one turn by a bit, and we backtracked maybe 100 meters.
- TA3; along the river trail to this TA; we saw some teams, including EMS, biking the other way for some reason; we passed our river swim spot

TREKKING
- CP11; we swam the river in the same spot as we had in the morning, then we ran the roads, bushwhacked a few meters, and hit this one pretty easily; my legs didn't feel nearly as strong as they had during the morning trek.
- CP12; this was where things went severely South (figuratively and literally, as it happens); we couldn't find the mapped road leaving CP11, and we ended up crossing a fence and following a road that led us past several houses to a cow pasture and then nearly to Morris Bridge Road, near the town of Branchton, where I figured out where we were; on the way back, we ran into EMS and Nomad in the cow pasture, and we went through a gate to the other road with them, before I turned the wrong way for a moment and the other teams got a bit ahead of us; we got most of the way to the CP, but we turned left a bit early on an umapped road (where the bends in the road coincidentally matched very closely to the ones we should be seeing) and looked in vain for the surveyors trail; we backtracked about a mile, then walked back in while I pace counted everything; this yielded the correct road (although there was a healthy margin added to the distance it took to get there, versus what the map indicated); we followed the surveyors tape, Montrail streamers, and surveyors stakes to the CP, then we followed a series of distances and numerical bearings halfway to CP13 to find the punch for CP12.
- CP13; we managed to employ fancy compass and pacing work for about 500 meters to find the orange-blazed trail and the CP, where the boogie man staff person ambushed us.
- CP14; this was a pretty long road run, followed by a short bushwhack to a "large oak in swamp, vegetation boundary"; uneventful--whew!
- CP15; we initially set out to bushwhack straight to this one, but the deep water quickly dissuaded us, and we turned around to take the trail/road around, only to find that the road was downright venitian; we eventually got out of the swamp and into the big clearing (the one where Tom had sprined his ankle earlier going to CP5) on some hard-to-follow trails; somehow, we managed to end up at the old railroad grade, where we found the CP after going a few minutes.
- CP16; all we had to do was follow the river Northward to the CP at the road bridge; the only problem was that the river was flooded, so it was a wet slog.
- TA4; I got confused and thought the TA was directly across the river from us, but I wasn't sure how we were supposed to get across; after spinning our wheels for a minute, I realized that we had to go about another 1.5 miles; we hit the trail and were even able to do a bit of towing; the leg was straightforward, and we rolled into the TA well before the cut-off.

TIME TRIALS
- We all did our jobs well
- My legs became even more sliced up and hypersensitive going through the palmetto, despite doing my best to take routes that would avoid it
- I plotted the ensuing biking and paddling sections at my usual snail's pace
- The organizers removed a few biking CPs, since the race times were running long

BIKING
- BCP1 was a long ride, mostly on paved road; we overshot a bit at the end, because the faint old dirt road was hard to see.
- BCP4 was on the edge of a big marsh, right next to the trail--no problem.
- BCP5 required us to get across a ditch to an old railroad grade road; the CP was on a drainage ditch between the road and the interstate.
- BCP6 was on an old foundation, off the powerline; it was a short distance from BCP5, but I managed to waste a few minutes looking for mapped roads that no longer existed, rather than simply following the powerlines.
- BCP7 was on the poison sumac covered dirt/sand pile next to the powerlines; we got to cross the river over the flood control gates to get there.
- BCP8 was the one on the island in the pond/marsh; I had plotted it somewhat farther around the road bend than it really was, so I thrashed around in the palmetto for what seemed like a long time, before eagle-eyed Sara spotted it from the road and called me back.
- BCP9 was about 1/4 mile from BCP8, and we found it right away then crossed under Morris Bridge Road.
- BCP15, 14 and 12 were in the maze of bike trails that included Piglet, Palmetto, Sinkhole, Grandpa, Misery, Hogwild, Indian, and of course, Main Trail; the map bore a loose resemblance to reality, and I managed to only get a little lost in here.
- BCP16 was the bike drop, and we rode there on some of the sandy trails we had seen earlier in the day.

PADDLING
- CP17; after a leisurely transition to the boats, during which we scored a much better canoe, we headed down to CP17, which was adjacent to the finish.
- CP18; it took us just over 40 minutes to get to this next CP, where we were given the map for the mini-orienteering, and we split up to gather the tokens; we all got lost, but not too badly.
- CP19 and 20/finish; all we had to do was paddle back upriver to get there; we scavenged some of the race staff's bagels--yum!

USARA Champs; first trek. We did well on this, losing a bit of time at 6 and 7 but otherwise navigating cleanly.

USARA Champs; first canoe section, including lots of small portages, many places where we pushed and pulled the boat over logs in mid-river, and a few spots where we pulled to boat ashore to run for a checkpoint.

USARA Champs; first bike.

USARA Champs; second trek. We lost about 1 hour between 11 and 12, but many other teams lost a lot more here. After that fiasco, I decided to slow to a walk, so that I could pace count EVERYTHING. It worked, but that and the marshy going kept us proceeding slowly.

Went for a short, brisk evening run before the USARA Champs. My legs felt pretty good.