Training Log Archive: iansmith

Event: North American Championships
 

The NAOC Red/Blue Sprint Final. The technical difficulty of this sprint was low - somewhere between yellow and orange level for most of the sprint. From the preliminary sprint, I gleaned that the fastest route typically was taking roads and trails rather than pushing through green or even open woods, but I did make at least one route "error" where I traveled directly rather than taking the road (from 14 to 15).

In general, my only criticism of my run was that I was too slow. Sprints thus far have been my forte; of the courses, my sprints have the smallest percentage difference between my performance and that of elite runners. Unfortunately, my training was not up to the day's 5.6 km of all out sprinting.

I believe that with a bit more running over the past 10 days, I could have pushed my time to 21 minutes or less, but that's all fruitless conjecture. In general, I was pleased with my run given the difficulty of the course.

My biggest errors were a slow route choice from 5 to 6 (I ran south along the green to the trail, but I think pushing through the green would have been faster), choosing to travel directly from 14 to 15 rather than going north to the road, and overshooting control 24 by about twenty meters.

Warmup before the sprint final. I felt a bit tight after the preliminary round and the long cool period, so I ran considerably more than earlier in the day at a very gentle pace. Brendan and some other runners were also warming up about this time.

The 2008 NAOC Sprint preliminary course. I think I have a more liberal definition of "spiking" a control than most based on comparative statistics of other orienteers near my level. I define a spike as approaching a control and finding it exactly where I expect it to be. I suppose I often include errors of order 20 meters within a spike - say for instance I came over a hill expecting to see a control in front of me and it was to my left. There isn't a large space of approaches between my definition of a spike and an error, which I suppose I should amend in future logs.

Anyway, this was my best sprints to date relative to the field. I had one significant, 30-second error approaching 4 because I hadn't really planned for it. The first three controls were so easy that I was not planning ahead as aggressively as I should have. That noted, there were really only two faster routes - I charged directly at 4 through the green and hit the larger clearing about thirty meters east of the control. I spent about fifteen seconds hunting through the green for the smaller clearing and found I had moved too far to the north.

Apart from that mistake, a few seconds lost looking for 5 and a moderately poor route choice at 8, the run went about as well as it could have. I started to fatigue, but my average speed was acceptable. With the exception of Erik Nystrom's 10:30, the leaders finished at just over 11 minutes. The navigational difficulty of this course was very low, but a delta of 20% is acceptable at present.

This was also the first time I have ever beaten Brendan (by 3 seconds), who went into this course expecting more navigational difficulty and didn't push his speed as much as he could have. I need to focus on running faster and on making quick route choice decisions in sprint conditions, especially with more challenging navigation than what this course and location presented.

Warmup before the preliminary sprint. Legs felt stiff.

Sprint Red/Blue Final - Splits

Sprint Red/Blue Preliminary - Splits