Training Log Archive: iansmith

Running around on Ponkapoag in advance of my meet on Sunday. I vetted the control sites more aggressively than I typically would, both because I have never been on the map before and because the map is very old - apparently older than I am. That noted, the terrain is very impressive. The running is delightful; while there are some dense areas of knee high vegetation, there is very little green briar or other blood-drawing plans, and the woods are generally passable. I found some delightful areas, and most of the 15 controls on the 4.8 km green course are in clear, pristine woods. The map is clearly outdated - it would be wonderful to remap it. It was originally mapped at 1:15, the contours are crude, the vegetation has changed, and some of the rock features are inconsistent.

While the map is basically as-is (though I changed a few minor details), the terrain is delightful, and I think the course should be straightforward.

The Garmin gave up on life near the end of my excursion, and I shortened the time to reflect a better measure of the fitness and technical benefit I received.

ARDF results posted

C • Oh man... 8

Event: CSU Park-O 8: Long Pond
 

Long Pond Park-O. I wasn't really focused when I started the race, and it showed in my execution. I lost about two minutes to hesitation and general confusion at 5; it looks like I questioned my location and aborted my plan prematurely. I chose a bad exit from 5 punching through green, and tried to attack six far too early even though my attack was the combined top of hill and curve in trail. I started sluggishly, and didn't really sustain an aggressive pace until the end of the race.

I lost by three minutes to Dancho, and by 11 seconds to Giovanni, who audibly "beeped" instead of pin-punching. Not a terrible effort, but not particularly productive either. Good course by Brendan.

Quickroute

Quick warmup.

Control pickup and easy trail running; before picking up controls, I backtracked on the course to check on a man and his daughter who were still out and had been seen by many competitors making their way along. They had just passed control 11 and were steadily on the way to 12. I stayed out of their way, circled behind them and picked up the last two controls. I didn't do enough enough warm up and cool down today. I debated going for a short run after getting home, but Tre Kronor Cooking with Magnus Bjorkman had too much allure. Today's lesson involved preparing a tasty pasta salad.

Advanced - Splits

Easy-ish run around the river. Either my HR monitor or my heart appears to be malfunctioning. I did not feel well earlier today, and I ate about 4 oz of Gruyere cheese before going for a run. Perhaps those factors could explain, but I'm reasonably sure that my heart rate wasn't as high as the monitor suggests. To verify the validity of the HR signal, I kicked into a fast stride and took a split at 5:24.

I ran without an audiobook, in quiet contemplation. I hope that increasing my running time will both improve my physical fitness and give me a degree of mental serenity; there are few better opportunities for reflection.

Easy run around the river. I briefly ran into my friend, David Stair. Heart rate data is clearly nonsensical; I estimate my HR was in the neighborhood of 150-155. I started relistening to the audiobook Deep Survival; it came up in conversation with Joseph Huberman in San Diego.

Easy run around the block with Magnus. We stopped at Chipotle midway through the run, and I taught him the ways of the burrito.

Woo Canada! - Canada abolishes the penny.

Sergei Shtanko. "No, maybe I can't win. Maybe the only thing I can do is just take everything he's got. But to beat me, he's going to have to kill me. And to kill me, he's gonna have to have the heart to stand in front of me. And to do that, he's got to be willing to die himself."

C • Woo! 1

Event: NEOC: Nobscot
 

The 80m frequency has always appealed to me more than 2m. Because the signals always indicate the true direction of the transmitters and lack spurious reflections, the 80m competition is more like a race and less like a crapshoot game of 3-card monty. I had a solid race and took a comfortable victory over Brad, a newcomer from LAOC. Grant and his wife went home on Saturday night, depriving me of more competition.

I struggled with the altitude - Mt. Laguna is at about 6,000 feet, and the vegetation and climb were unforgiving at times. I took the controls in the correct order - 1, 3, 2, 4, 5. I estimate that I lost about 10 minutes relative to a perfect race - one cycle on control 2, at around km 5, and one on control 5 at km 8 on my track. With a strong push at the beginning of the race and good fortune finding the controls off cycle, it might have been possible to get to control 3 at 18-20 minutes instead of the 23 it took me. Vadim was running faster than I at the beginning of the race; his time of 52 minutes was impressive, though he didn't have to get control 2.

I am quite happy that I had a good race - though it wasn't quite as dominant as my 2010 result. I easily qualified for the world championships team (unsurprising, as there are two open M21 slots besides mine), and I hope to face my Ukrainian nemesis, Sergei Shtanko, in Serbia. Provided I have enough vacation time, I will train aggressively over the summer with Lori (who had two very good races and is better at putting her equipment together).

My fitness is always an area that warrants improvement, and if I hope to compete with the Shtanko and the speedy Czechs, I will need to be faster. I have hopes that my orienteering background and fearlessness in the face of difficult vegetation will prove useful in competition. I have unusual ARDF technique; I remember rather than draw bearings, and thumb my map rather than mount it on a board. I haven't decided if I should revise my technique, but I am inclined to practice memory for bearings simply because the improved ergonomics of thumbing are far more comfortable and expedient for me. I am also hopeful that I can psych out my adversaries with my lack of drawn bearings without losing any pertinent information.

Results main page
2m Results, aw
80m Results, yay

C • Nice! 20

After the awards ceremony, I helped the Hubermans consume their leftover food. I hadn't made concrete plans for how I would spend the afternoon, so when it was brought to my attention that the late WWII-era aircraft carrier USS Midway was in San Diego, that the last tour started at 4 PM, and that the museum closed at 5. I made haste on the drive, losing a few minutes to a wrong turn and to delays finding parking. I arrived at the Midway at 4:05 PM, and despite repeated efforts, I was unable to persuade a rather contrarian museum employee to let me on board. I would have happily paid the entry fee just to stand on the flight deck. I have read about aircraft carriers all my life, but never have I been aboard one. To come so close to fulfilling a childhood dream and fail was devastating; I gazed longingly upon the hull from about 30m away for a while before departing. In an unexpected treat, the Nimitz-class USS Carl Vinson was moored across the channel.

The Essex class USS Intrepid is a museum ship in Manhattan; I will have to visit her sometime soon. My favorite aircraft carrier is unquestionably the USS Enterprise of World War II fame, but she was sadly scrapped in the late 1950s.

I stopped by a restaurant in Little Italy and ate a tasty plate of Fettuccine Alfredo with a glass of wine before retiring to the airport. While the wine instantaneously enhanced the dinner, I had some head and stomach discomfort that I attribute to the wine. I am a lightweight.

At the competition, I got a hearty laugh out of the suggestion that I (and Lori) get my ham radio license. I race ARDF for the competition, not the radio aspect; while I'm happy that some people enjoy radios, I have absolutely no interest in amateur radio.

C • Intrepid 2

C • ham license 4

US_ARDF_80m_M21 - Splits

Warmup and drills before the 2m race.

The 2012 US ARDF Champs were at Laguna Village near San Diego this year. After some reluctance, I decided to attend the event because I want to make the team for the 2012 World Champs in Serbia, and I didn't feel comfortable accepting a slot without showing up and earning it.

My attempt to avoid sacrificing a work day led to crazy logistics; I left Boston at 5 PM on Friday, landed in San Diego at 11 PM, and after a quick nap to avoid dying on the roads, arrived at the meet site at 3 AM (PST). I sleepily put my receiver together at about 8, and we were ferried to the event start at 8:45.

There were problems with the event organization immediately. For each race, five transmitters (with an e-punch at each) are set in the woods. Unlike in O, their exact location isn't that important; it takes a lot of effort to set a transmitter wrong. The information about their location isn't on the map, so they really can be anywhere without affecting the legitimacy of the race, as long as they are audible from the start location (as per the rules). Despite only having to set five transmitters, there were problems with two of them at the scheduled start time, so we waited for two hours while the organizers went into the woods to change the batteries or some such nonsense. Despite these efforts, transmitter #1 was off for the duration of the race, so we only raced with four controls. Fail.

My Garmin died midway through the race because I had turned it on at my scheduled start and forgotten to turn it off while we waited. In an idiotic oversight, I had put my yagi antenna together incorrectly, swapping the long and short elements. I haven't worked out exactly what that did to the signal and the relative phases of the components, but what I was hearing was garbage. While I could hear the receivers, my direction-finding ability was totally shot, and I had trouble localizing anything. The antenna was held together with screws, so even had I figured out the error, I could not have fixed it mid-race. By some miraculous confluence of good fortune and geographic reasoning, I found control #4 on a hill. I didn't want to give up, so I ran around for three hours searching in vain for the other four transmitters. My attack of the knucklehead was entirely my fault, and clearly I should have spent a non-zero amount of time with a 2m receiver in the past year. Poor preparation will lead to failure.

There were 3 M21s competing. Brad made the same mistake I did - incorrectly assembling his antenna - and found no controls. Grant, the Canadian, found two before encountering a mountain lion at 10-20m distance running at full speed. He made noise and shook his receiver to scare it away, but discovered shortly afterward that his radio had flown off his antenna into the woods. He searched for a time, but eventually had to bail out. He doesn't use his map, so had no idea where he was; he apparently got a ride back to the finish and so DQ'd himself. As a result, in a pitiful demonstration of 2m proficiency, I won the race.

Words cannot express the frustration I felt during the race; I haven't been out on a course that long in many years, and I have never failed to find all the transmitters in an ARDF competition. Three hours without any water and the technical difficulties at the start of the race did not improve my mood.

C • Reality ARDF 9