Training Log Archive: immy

Arrgh can someone please put me out of my misery - when are they going to announce the WOC and WUOC teams already??? Surely it doesn't need to take this long.

C • I know!!! 2

A moderate effort on the bike at the gym because I felt like it. My bike is having a service today so no cycling to uni for me :(

Cool down.

Core, proprioception and arms. Tried to go through everything reasonably fast, and it was pretty tiring.

Just a brief warm up before the loops race.

Mass start loops race at Pines Beach. I was in a very black mood about this race, and had to wait a day or so before I could bring myself to write about it... This was yet another example of abysmal orienteering by me, which seems to have been quite a theme this weekend. In summary, I navigated poorly to probably around half the controls, and basically just ran off without a good plan half the time. This resulted in a good 13 minutes of mistakes... So anyway, on the postive side, there is plenty to learn from! Though I think half of it is stuff that I should most definitely know by now. But it appears I'm quite a slow learner.

Anyway, here are some of the problems I've discovered:
1. Bad mental approach to the race - I've had several good races lately, so this meant that I was hoping to do well, and so my goal for the race was "do well" without focussing on the process and actually using my navigation skills.
2. Still angry about yesterday.
3. Not coping well with the pressure of a mass start - getting stressed and again worrying about being slower than everyone else. I need to get over this already - it's not important! Navigation is. Weirdly I was coming first after the first loop (everyone was making mistakes), and obviously didn't deal well with this either because I lost over 7 minutes on the next loop... yeah...
4. Not pausing to recollect my thoughts when something went wrong. If I make a mistake, I need to think that this means I wasn't reading my map enough/didn't have a good enough plan, and try to do this better on the next leg! Not just rush off and try to regain lost time... never works.
5. Negative self talk... instead, when I made a mistake I mentally gave up and was telling myself I was hopeless at orienteering :(

I think the hardest lesson is probably the last one... even now I am struggling with it. I have to be positive and be confident that I can actually orienteer! But the self doubt really sets in when things start to go wrong.

So, things I can do better:
1. Work on my mental approach to each race. Have a positive attitude! I love orienteering after all, even on the bad days :)
2. Have process goals, e.g. I will have an excellent plan for each control, and take a few seconds to make one if necessary. (Not "I want to do well" - recipe for disaster that one.)
3. Stop and recollect my thoughts after a mistake, and start paying more attention to the map.

Sometimes I think I take this all way too seriously... but yeah, I want to do my best, and I want to improve, so hopefully some critical analysis will help! Nothing for it but to learn from this and move forward.

Warm down through the forest with the girls - saw some earthquake cracks!

Then in the afternoon before flying home we saw a crane demolishing a parking building and went to the container mall! :O

Warming up at Orton Bradley Park, just on the road - pretty boring. Happy to be racing in the South Island though!

Long at Orton Bradley - 6.2km. I just didn't get into this race today for some reason. Physically I was feeling a bit flat, and once I saw that it was kind of a park map I got a bit lazy with my navigation, and so made a few mistakes. Fluked the control that was in the wrong place though (number 5), but then ended up in a patch of green where the second control in the wrong place (number 21) should have been. Also hesitated a lot around 7 and 10, chose a lousy route to 14 (I was too lazy to go over the hill so went around), stuffed up 17... yeah those were the main ones as far as I remember.

Need to focus even if it is a park map! And work on my height judgement - don't get lazy about it.

Map 1
Map 2

Warm down with the girls. Checked out Georgia's cottage :)

Decent warm up around the school and roads - I was feeling better than this morning, which was nice.

Arrgh! Disaster! This was a very intense sprint at Van Asch School with lots of uncrossable things that made route choice very important. Unfortunately I started getting lazy with my navigation again, and was running too fast... so I wasn't in control and made some pretty bad mistakes. Orienteering 101 fail :( I knew I wasn't in control and wasn't reading my map enough, but didn't slow down or do anything about it! Biggest mistakes were running straight past 15 then relocating and running back, and getting very very confused about the control in the garage. Ran straight past it then decided I had better actually work out what was going on. Then had to hunt around the cars for a bit before finding it.

There were a lot of poor route choices too... Main problem was minimal planning and making up the route as I went along.

I am not quite sure why I suddenly decided not to orienteer properly. I guess it's back to the same old thing of being worried about being too slow, trying to go faster and then not reading my map enough. I really need to be able to stop this as soon as it starts to happen! A difficult thing to do in a race, evidently.

Map 1
Map 2

Longer angry warm down trying to shake off bad feelings about the race :(

Event: South Island Secondary School Champs/NZ Superseries round 3
 

Rest day and travelling to Christchurch. We got off the bus too late and ended up the wrong side of the red zone, so spent a while lugging our bags to the accomodation. Fairly tiring.

I have more energy for this when I don't do other training :)

But before I eventually got out the door I was feeling so tired this morning, really didn't want to get up at all...why??

C • WOC maps 5

Intense session on the bike at the gym. I was meant to do this yesterday, but figured it would be ok doing it today instead - I still have a rest day before the weekend :) It was really fun actually, but tough! When it is set to "random" the easiest level is really easy, but the hardest level is so hard, so it's a bit like intervals. I did a few 20-30s efforts out of the seat but otherwise stayed seated most of the time.

The first 10 minutes were at a slightly easier level just so I could warm up, but it ended up being quite hard work anyway.

Easy cool down.

Easy aqua jog. Now that I'm running again, aqua jogging feels kind of like dragging your legs through mud... so much resistance.

Legs felt not too bad, but had a tendency to really burn going up hills.

Fun cycling with dad this morning :) This autumn is turning out to be a real winner!

C • winner 3

Rather busy day again, so I had no time to go to the gym... also was working at the restaurant tonight, which I nearly forgot about. Tried to cycle home super fast in order to not be late, but there were so many cars around which was extremely irritating :(

Same old.

Warm up on the stationary bike while I waited for Mike. We were going to do what I thought to be a short and sweet interval session on the bike...

...but it turned out to be death. I feel like I have never properly done an interval session in my life until now. We did the most horrific hill intervals: 1 minute hard, out of the seat, not resting on your arms, with as fast a cadence as possible. Complete and utter death. I honestly don't know how I survived the last 30s of each interval.

While doing the intervals Mike was "encouraging" me with useful comments like "pain is your friend" and "Simone Niggli is just up the hill ahead of you, you're catching up to her!" The better part of me was yelling I don't care about Simone Niggli, give her the freaking gold medal already! But somehow I got through the intervals anyway.

Pretty satisfied to have survived that.

C • Yayneity. 3

Cool down.

Cycled home, and actually felt ok on the flat... I was just a total snail on any of the hills.