Training Log Archive: Wyatt

Felt pretty similar to yesterday, and fairly clean again (I think) but had a ~5-10% worse result, relatively, dropping two places overall. I'm getting a sore throat today (Mon.) so maybe that was affecting things. Plus I fell 3 more times, including one hard one on my R-side (hurting my R-knee again) which couldn't have helped much. After the third fall (~2km from the end) I was kind of dragging my R leg along behind me at times. Also, my legs were probably a little shot from the runs the previous day, as I wasn't as good at being aggressive on climb, and was a little sloppier/slow through green. I'll need to wait for splits to get a better idea of what happened.
2x ice/elevation for the knee this evening...

Blue - Splits

Event: DVOA Watergap A event
 

Ran hard, fairly clean. Fell 4 times, including 3x on the first leg, hitting my R-knee pretty hard on a rock on the 1st fall. After some numbness it was okay. My time was pretty reasonable. I caught Vlad 5 minutes halfway through, pulled nearly 1 min ahead, then really started dying off and he got 1 minute ahead by the end.

US Team 1KM as warmup

US Team 1km re-run, after finish on Day 1, w/sore knee. I wonder if this alone affected Day 2 much? I hope not.

Blue - Splits

1 km Challenge - Splits

R-foot sore/lightly painful on R-ankle eversion after 20x20lbs. All other directions/sides got to 40x20lbs without difficulty (just some normal tiredness.) This is sitting on the floor at the gym with a cable attach to a rope around my shoe near the toes. I think this is a good thing to try to get really strong at, for O' ankle strength & R-foot recovery. Hopefully I can do this 3x/week in the future.

Relatively flat. ~90% grass near offices. There's probably a square mile of offices with lots of mowed grass around them about 1 mile east of here which I hadn't found an easy way into until a few weeks ago - and I've lived here over a year. Silly me.

After reviewing the WCOC courses, and my results further, I've come to the following self-improvement conclusions:
1) Need to learn to run faster downhill. Foot and ankle strength are especially needed, as is a bit of fearlessness.
2) Need to be able to stay focussed on those long downhills w/o slowing down much, perhaps by better compass/pace?
3) Need to go a little straighter in this type of terrain, and as usual, always compass/pace together with map reading.

The one split I won all weekend (tie) was 7-8 on day 1. On the way up to 7, I picked a bearing, measured a pace, and memorized the map section. I then ran the leg hard, with all that in mind, checking the map only breifly once, and even then forcing myself to not study but just keep moving, because compass/pace was still working fine. That worked even with half the leg downhill, in part because I never needed to check my map on the downhill and could focus on running and footing.

Also, I was especially careful with my bearing, even sighting specific trees ~50 meters away a few times, which gave me extra confidence that compass/pace alone would get me to the bag...

It's almost sad that precise compass/pace seems to work so well because I do like reading the map.

2:58, 2:49, 2:47, 2:44, on leg 2-3 of McKaig course. (vs. my best whole (20min) course split of 3:09).