Training Log Archive: PG

Walking a good bit better this evening, after a day mostly sitting at a desk. I've always thought that a good way to deal with injury was not to think about it, not to stress over it, so that it get a chance to relax.

Perhaps transferring all that stress to tax returns is the ultimate way to test the theory. Hadn't thought of that before. But the leg is definitely better, both the Achilles and the hamstring.

Took care of lots of things today. Might have to get out the golf clubs tomorrow, or the bike, or both, since my calendar for "Independence Day" is wide open. :-)

I had a bit of a discussion with Mike Minium Saturday evening. Mike is one of those folks who does more than you could ever imagine for orienteering, and does it well too.

Mire was the WRE event advisor. Responsible for the WRE, not the whole event. Nevertheless, when he made a visit in February to check things out, he checked all the controls, not just the M21 and F21. He's already written on AP about the difficulty of dealing with a map that you wish were better. One of those cases where you have choices, but none of them are very good, so you do the best you can.

And Mike visited #6 on Saturday's Brown course. And came back and told the organizers to fix the map or not use the control.

In checking things Thursday/Friday, again trying to check everything, not just the M21/F21, nothing had been done to #6. And it was too late for him to do anything. And he saw it was just on the Brown, and hoped we could deal with it. And wished there was a better choice.

I don't fault Mike at all. In fact I give him credit for all his efforts. But how is it that the event advisor can say it's wrong, and nothing changes?

Having said that, I will also admit that there is a part of me that sympathizes with the course setter, because I had had that role many times, and it is not easy. The grading system is OK/fail, where no mistakes translates to an OK score, and even one small mistake translates to fail. I wish there was another way. I wish there was a way of dealing with mistakes, so that one mistake wasn't fatal. But that doesn't seem possible.

And yet in Adventure Racing, which I have never done, misplaced controls and bad maps seem to be common occurrences. And they deal with it. Exactly how I'm not sure, but they deal with it. And there are a lot more AR people then there are orienteers.

We strive for perfection, and being human, often/usually don't get there. That's true for the organizers, also true for our performances as orienteers.

Are we just setting ourselves up for failure? And yet this seems to be the way we want it. Is there another way?

C • National controller 11

A day at an O' meet when your not orienteering is a bit of a drag, unless you are an organizer when it is just a lot of stress. I was someplace in between, not orienteering (no way I even considered going out), but just a relatively minor duty, part of the Review Panel for deal with the Team's petitions from folks who couldn't make it to the Trials.

A good discussion with the rest of the panel, general agreement on the final decision. You hope you do it right, you think you have done it right, but that doesn't mean that everyone will think the same. Just part of life.

And then off to the airport with Kissy for good company, and then an easy flight up to White Plains, and then, whoops, we sat on the taxiway for an hour and 20 minutes because the TSA folks had found a suitcase without an apparent owner, so the terminal shut down just as we were getting there. I will give credit to the AirTran pilot, he was on the intercom every 10 minutes with whatever he could find out about what was going on and what the prognosis was, and I think that made a big difference as everyone stayed pretty mellow.

Finally got off, the terminal was chaos, trying to run everyone back through security, and the access road coming in was chaos, I assume full of people either trying to leave or trying to pick up someone. Fortunately got away without further delay.

Right leg is unhappy, but no worse than yesterday, so I am slightly less bummed.... :-)

Posted my GPS track from yesterday on Route Gadget.

C • Airport woes 6

My favorite snippet from an otherwise too lengthy Board discussion about GPS was the following --

There is rampant cheating at these events. (from board Amy Williams, who is involved with orienteering in schools and was referring to events with lots of high school teams participating.)

By using GPS? (from another Board member)

No, not at all GPS, the old-fashioned way (meaning collaboration).

And then the Board quickly moved back to GPS, not wanting to handle that hot potato. Better to deal with the problem that might be than the problem that is.

Well, certainly not an overall wonderful day. But at least there was a good bit of pleasure to compensate for a bunch of shit.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first, and that would pretty much cover the 44 minutes starting at 12:30, when I started today's M65 course, until 1:14, when I slowly headed back to the finish, limping badly, having trashed my right Achilles, trashed my right hamstring, and taken 26 minutes to find a control that should not have been any problem if only it had been where it was shown on the map.

On the good side, a number of good conversations, a fine dinner with a BAOC group and my local regulars (Charlie, Phil, Gail), and a 10-0 Board vote in favor of a "carry but don't use" GPS policy.

Back to the orienteering. Perhaps the best thing I could have done was to remember my activity of the evening before, when a little searching had uncovered a blog that mapper Sam Smith had kept in the 3 years he had worked on the map. And as I read through the blog what struck me most was how much time he had put into it with what was apparently either a lousy baseman or no baseman. What I should have learned was not have high expectations, and orienteer according.

But, foolish me, I kept thinking that something on the map meant that there was something similar in the terrain.

Got to 1 and 2 OK, though feeling quite uneasy. To 3, followed the major ride (unmapped) that seemed to go about along the mapped vegetation boundary (nonexistent). Slightly to the left on approach, corrected quickly, and then managed to find the control in the wrong reentrant with the help of others.

To 4, not sure how I got from the first campground to the second when I was aiming for the control, but I did somehow. To 5, ran a long ways down the streamers to #11 before deciding that maybe 5 was a different direction. This one was surely all my fault.

But these were all minor matters. Got about halfway to six, was descending a short steep slope, and stepped in an animal hole, toes jammed up, nothing under my heel, sharp pains in the Achilles. Kept moving, it hurt but not so bad I had to stop. Got close to the control, well, I think the best analogy is to O's sister sport, golf, where a pro once was asked to explain how he managed to take 5 putts on a hole, and he replied succinctly, "Miss, miss, miss, miss, make."

I think on 6 I was "miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, oh no, why is my hamstring hurting, oh no, my hamstring is killing me, miss, and then make." Much worse than the 5 putts, but then he knew where the hole was. I thought I knew where the O' marker was, silly me, I was looking close to the river, at the top of a slope, and on the edge of a green patch, whereas the flag was quite a ways from the river, nowhere near any slope, and nowhere near any green. Quite obvious if you just knew where to look.

I found it by happenstance, and then very slowly walked in.

Certainly a good day to have a GPS track. I found the control about 46:30 after I started.

Thought about protesting, didn't, decided I was hurt before I got there and might not have finished. Leave it to someone else. And then I listened to a few other sad tales of woe there, people wondering if it was them or the map, not sure, relieved to know it was the map.

And still the question -- what do you do? Protest or not? People seemed scared to. You don't win any friends by protesting. It can be quite lonely. What do you do?

C • protesting 26

Event: US Individual Championships (Sprint/Middle/Long/Trail)
 

Here is Course 3 (Brown, M65). Course 5 (Red/Blue) and Course 4 (Green) went the same general routing, just generally had some legs that required going further off the straight-line, so the effective distance was a good bit longer.

Click on the image for a larger version.

USA Sprint Champs at the University of West Georgia. Beeline distance was 2.9 km.

Pretty good run, had to stop about three times to be able to see whether there really was a passable gap where I thought there was. Twice there was, once there wasn't. Actually on the latter, I really wasn't sure, so went around just to be on the safe side.

Sometimes the narrow gaps are really hard to see well. The map may be 1:4,000 as it was today, but it's just as hard to read as the 1:15 regular maps because the line widths and the gaps are small. But I guess that is just the way the powers that be like to have the maps.

First half was mostly dealing with the usual college campus stuff, last part had longer legs with significant route choice. Overall the course seemed fine, just longer than what a sprint is supposed to be. My guess is if you took a poll of everyone there, you'd actually get a majority in favor of being a little longer -- and therefore getting to do more orienteering -- but that is just a guess.

And I think that my course (Brown, M65) was a good bit shorter than the Blue/Red and Green courses in terms of optimum route, so the absurdity of the beeline distances (Blue/Red 3.1, Green 3.0, Brown 2.9) was lessened.

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On the 305 front, two items. For those of us not in the WREs, there was the option of taping the displays, and tape readily available. When I started, and I started fairly late, according to the start person no one had taped up.

Second item is the result of my research on whether my 305 helped me at all, and there the answer is clearly that it cost me time, maybe something on the order of 10 seconds. The reason for this, perhaps not a reason expected, is that for whatever reason, maybe negligence on my part, maybe a side effect of my recent slimming, whatever, by the time I had done 2 or 3 controls the chest strap for my heart rate monitor was slipping down. I'd pull it back up as high as I could, a minute later it was falling again.

I repeated this perhaps 5 or 6 times, then gave up, it spent the last half of the run around my race and recording some awesome numbers. But I can't imagine the time spent concentrating on the strap helped my concentration on the map, and for the first half of the course I several times felt like I was not paying nearly enough attention to my orienteering. Fortunately no mistakes, but I had the sense of going a little slower than I should have.

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Beautiful afternoon, nice event set-up, good karma. Spent a while visiting pre-race with the first aid guy, figured maybe going there before would mean going after wouldn't be necessary. A very nice guy.

My only disappointment was that I was hoping that one of our controls would be on a statue of Newt, since this is where he got his start as a historian/consultant. But I guess plans for that have been suspended....

Sprint - Brown - Splits

Usual trails, more sprint training.

Entertainment from Freakonomics about quitting, very interesting, will have to remember to listen to the last 20 minutes. As usual, although the creators I'm sure don't realize it, there were numerous items with relevance to O', including an item from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who on quitting his post lamented that while other cabinet members got to go to exotic places around the globe, the Secretary of Labor ended up in places like Toledo, or St. Louis on a good day.

If only he knew those were two orienteering hot spots (one future, one past?)....

C • Woo Toledo! 10

Just trying to do a little sprint training in preparation for Friday (similar time and pace)....

L&F is progressing very slowly, but it is progressing.