Training Log Archive: iansmith

Event: Georgia Navigator Cup / Southeast Interscholastics Championships
 

Day 1 of the Navigator Cup, Red Top Mountain State Park; a lethargic performance. The terrain was open and fast, with rolling hills and reentrants in Piedmont Appalachia. I made about 2:00 of execution errors, and 2:00 of route choice errors. The woods were so visible and the features so large that making big mistakes was difficult.

My warmup was a little shorter than I wanted; my legs felt heavy and sluggish. I couldn't find my O-socks; I thought I had left them back in Boston, but it turns out they were in the bottom of my suitcase. Fail. Anyway, I ran with compression sleeves instead. I've never run with them, so I don't know if they contributed to my general feeling of slowness.

I never felt spritely in the woods, and in comparing splits with Boris and the Keninator, I was running more slowly and losing 10-15s on basically every leg. I'm disappointed by my performance today, but hopefully I can improve in the next few weeks.

I made a 30s error in the circle at 1 when I wasn't confident and had to trundle along the reentrant for a little while to find the cliff. I also knocked the stand over when I punched, so I spent maybe 10s prospecting to put it back up. I made a parallel error at 7 where I exited 6 the wrong way and took a suboptimal route via the road, losing about 45s. I lost 45s total on 3 and 4 with a bad route choice. I then lost about 60s total on route choice to 16 and 17. Excepting the (erroneous) finish split, I beat Ken and Boris on only 6 of 32 possible person-splits, which sort of tells the story of this race. It was cool for CSU to decisively sweep the podium.

Warmup jog on the model map and a run to the start.

Cool down run.

Blue - Splits

Easy run, 1 cm snow, icy.

In exciting news, my log has just passed 100,000 views! I suppose my quirky logging nuances, digressions, and diatribes are more captivating than my actual training, but I'm still humbled and delighted that people have taken an interest in reading my log. Two AP logs have more hits than I and are newer - tRicky and murraystraining.

Tonight's workout was a 20 min tempo run at 4:03/km, postponed from yesterday. Conditions were moderate; -4 C, breezy, and a light snowfall. There was about a cm of snow on the ground with some patches of black ice. After a long warmup, I turned on my 180 bpm techno. I focused on feeling relaxed for the first few km, and my pace was steady and good. I started hurting a bit over the last km - I think more due to the stresses of the cadence than the speed. I hit a few patches of ice, but I think my foot placement is directly beneath my center of mass - I didn't fall or slide, I just lost traction.

C • River lights 2

Easy run to work. I felt progressively worse throughout the day - fatigued; I suspect I'm coming down with an illness. I cancelled my tempo plans.

If you could ask Marc Lauenstein one question (about orienteering), what would it be?

C • question 2

A delightful evening long run; the skies were clear, and the temperature was a balmy -1 C. It's amazing how much of a difference 10 C makes. I was a little overdressed (SL/S, gloves, speedy hat, buff). My pace was steady and plodding, and I felt good throughout the run. I faded after about 1:50 over the last few km. The roads and sidewalks had perhaps 1-2 cm of erratic snow and ice. This was a newish route, encircling the Fells and Boojum; my pace was a bit faster than a similar route I ran six months ago in sweltering July heat. I carried a light but no map and got lost once near km 7.