Training Log Archive: HGaston

Contours-only orienteering course at the training Eric led at Hamlin Park. The time is a complete guess, because I forgot to start my stopwatch. I really liked the course, because using only contours made it much more interesting/different from other courses I've run there.

My run was fairly clean, but there were controls I could have done better. I hesitated a little near control 2 because I didn't see the control on the other side of a rootstock, and I bobbled control 3 and chose a long route to 6.

Control 9 was my favorite because it was really far compared to the others, so there were some interesting route choices. It was also in the part of the park that I usually get confused in; there's a trail network there through light green, and I often spend too much time figuring out the trail junctions and wondering whether or not the trails have changed. With the contours-only map, I wasn't distracted by the trails and navigated much more directly. It was good practice in simplifying the map and maybe ignoring or not relying on the trail network in the future.

C • WOW nice training!!!! i wis... 1

Butterfly course. I ran against William, Drew, & Kelsey. It's the first time I've done a butterfly course, so it was fun to try it out. Drew beat me by ~20 seconds, which he decided to remind me of every 5 minutes or so...oh well ;-).

Fences orienteering course. I chose the wrong route to control 3 and had to climb over a pretty nasty barbed wire fence...oops. I was more careful after that :-).

A little bit of control pick-up.

Last WIOL regular season meet, at Fire Mountain. I had a good run on most of the controls, but I made a couple of mistakes...

Control 2: the control was at the end of a marsh; I pulled off of the trail too soon and followed a random and really big puddle instead. Lost some time here, but I'm not sure how much.

Control 3: my route was a combination of trail and yellow slash. The yellow slash was really nasty and should've been avoided completely. It looked pretty runnable in this section, but there were random blackberry strands mixed into the tall grass that I kept getting caught on.

Control 6: yellow slash again. Except that this yellow slash didn't even *look* runnable. The alternative routes were ~3x longer than the straight route through the slash, so I followed the trail until the point where the distance through the slash was smallest, and tried to go through. It was probably the densest brush I've ever tried to go through on an orienteering course. I basically fought my way in far enough that going back would be equally difficult as going forward...at this point I started wishing someone would just pull me out on some sort of hovercraft and I could get out of the blackberries without going through them in any direction...but anyway, I eventually managed to get out of it (with much talking to myself along the way).

Tori, if you're reading this, it was *really* similar to last year's leg, except that it went in the opposite direction....grrrr

C • yellow slash 4

Control pick-up. I jogged/walked; it was hard to go very fast while holding all the controls.

To Northacres, two loops through the park, & back to school with Drew and Max.

C • I saw you! 3

Haller Lake w/ Tori, Max, & Claire. Then we ran into William on the way back, who had some *questionable* excuses about why he hadn't run with us :-).

Hey, I *did* do a few minutes of abs!

Ran to Haller Lake and back with Max.

Tori, Max, William, & I ran to Bitterlake & back. It was great to run again, and we had some spectacular snowball fights along the way.

C • track 14