Training Log Archive: jennycas

Event: Australian 3 Days Championship - Day 1
 

As anticipated, times were longer than yesterday for the same distance due to this being an intricate school campus with lots of stairs. So I had no chance of cracking 20 min, especially as I wasn't feeling that great this morning and more than a little preoccupied by impending OA meetings. But managed to concentrate enough to interpret the 1: 3 000 map on the run without too much confusion although sometimes I went down or up flights of stairs which I probably could have avoided, and then there was the time I ran around the corner of a building, punched the control which I saw on a garden bed in front of me, then checked the number and of course I actually needed to be one building/garden further west. Guessing I could have saved up to a minute altogether on a better day?

Chairing the Technical meeting afterwards went ok although it suffered slightly from the time pressure of being squeezed in between Events committee & OA AGM. It certainly didn't suffer from lack of engagement by attendees!

W21E - Splits

Event: Good Friday Sprint Relay
 

6am flight out of Adelaide worked pretty well - certainly I'm glad I was't scrambling to leave work early yesterday, and it gave me the opportunity to catch up with a rogaining friend from Canberra who flew into Adl last night - and there was no pressure on me for the relay because SA had 2 extra women and Vic had (at least) 2 extra men so I ended up in an unofficial team of Abi/Jim/Blair/myself. And as 4th leg runner didn't see anyone running around me until gradually I reeled in Lily McFarlane and then promptly made a 40-second error on the shortest leg on the course. Overshot the courtyard I wanted, ran into a blind building corner where it turned out there was an undercover verandah leading to a stairwell, and actually started running up the stairs thinking the control might be at the top!

Dunno why I didn't just read the descriptions...at least I didn't actually look in the cupboard under the stairs. Anyway, it's been a while since I was able to run faster than I can think on a sprint, so I guess this mistake was sort of a positive :) And it was a really interesting uni campus, good fun course (thanks Ceri), scenic warmdown alongside the Swan River, and wonderful to see Manu again (thanks Liv). I was definitely ready for lunch @Zamia Cafe afterwards since my stomach's still on SA time.

Staying in East Perth with the Trewins so figured I'd go check out the original sprint venue for today, I mean take the opportunity to cross the new $90m Matagarup footbridge before the hordes started streaming across it to the stadium for this afternoon's game. (There was a steady trickle of Weagles fans already but I didn't spot any teal.) Explored Chevron Parklands around the stadium, which while pleasant enough aren't anywhere as intricate as this morning's venue, then came back via Windan Bridge & Claisebrook Cove.

Groped on boob & bum (separate incidents) by a flailer from the next lane :(

Up to/down from Bellevue Heights before heading to a pharmacists' dinner meeting. Work on turning the (still-closed) university gorge footbridge into a covered walkway appears to have begun.

The myriad frustrations are continually piling up upon themselves lately, so when I finally got to Nth Adl after battling city roadworks traffic and found no-one there, I was very tempted to go home & sit on the couch & eat junk food, but I've done that a bit too much lately (and it hasn't fixed anything), until along came Emily, Ben C and Jacquie & Mitchell, so I did some 200s with them despite not yet having warmed up, and felt better for it although am still not convinced that I'm not a horrible person.

Extended warmdown to KW St bridge and then back via the footbridge behind the zoo.

Figured I'd do the longest course today, so that 11km next Sun doesn't seem quite so daunting. I'm well aware that the native scrub sections here are very slow going (only one person on the 2.8km hard course broke the hour) and also that most of the pines have been felled & replanted since first we ran there over 30 years ago, but I really hadn't expected to faff around so much on a navigational level - just too much else to keep in my head lately, I guess, including mum's escalating memory loss. Mind you, even Simon had trouble with the first control, because the area mapped as light yellow open is now 5m-high young pines with an uncrossable windrow of old felled pines guarding the control knoll, so people got pushed all the way downhill to the track to get around that and then if they were lucky, found a MTB trail (of which there were lots & lots, all post-dating the map) to get back up the hill. I found the control feature before Simon did :)

Not really sure what I did on the next leg...seemed to go up & down the appropriate number of hills & gullies without ever being quite certain of where I was because the white vs yellow boundaries were fairly nebulous, and when I finally hit the track, thought I was too far NE of the red line so ran SW down the hill, came to an unexpected crossroads and eventually identified it as the mapped T-junction 300m further downhill than I needed to be for the control! After that I paid more attention to my surroundings but still managed to overshoot features more than once. Route choice 7-8 was definitely back through the finish, so I startled G at the car by grabbing a drink & muesli bar (probably should have taken my hat, because it was getting warm in the sun - although I would have continually lost it to the vegetation).

Took track routes more in the southern part, although not as often as I probably should have because I actually did come here to orienteer rather than just run. Grateful that the last part was in the more open paddocks, which did not stop me from getting confused about which paddock I was in. Overshot the 3rd-last control and as I was leaving it, saw Greg M & Ben C coming into it, so then I tried a bit harder all the way up the hill to the finish and they did not catch me! Managed to break 2 hours also, so I was pleased, although feel that there was at least 15 min of errors/poor routes in there. And my parents were happy that they'd managed to get around the surprisingly-physical easy course.

I informed the course planner that it had been "wonderfully challenging", and I left him to determine, upon which word I had placed the greater emphasis...

C • map 3

Since G was kind enough to drop parents home, I took advantage of the summery evening to go for a ride, as apparently I hadn't run hard enough earlier in the day.