Training Log Archive: Wyatt

Event: Half Wit Half Marathon
 

WOC 2009 Men's Middle Distance Qualifier, Heat B
Had a 'typical' result today - not an awful result like last year - so that's an improvement. Finished 30th this year, vs. 34th last year, so that's an improvement. And had only one esp. bad mistake this year.




Lost about 3:15 on # 6, a vague attack diagonal downhill trying to go about 400m on compass with 2 subtle errors contributing to 8 distinct partial attacks, with the last few being 'trying follow that guy to somewhere new'. Should've taken a slightly safer route, using a bit more trail, bouncing off a few more platforms along the way..? It was tough for me to nail - although 14 of 15 qualfiers did nail this. Perhaps adding some pace count, and more precision on the compass could've more clearly helped me hit the stone/pit 'line'.

After that one, I had two ~30-second misses, and some 5-10's.

It's obviously a great competitive field to compare oneself to. I imagine if I retired (now) and did primarily orienteering training, in Europe, I could get my navigation more consistent, where I could more reliably expect to lose only about 1 minute on a course like this. And I could probably get a bit faster. Both of which would be needed to make the finals at the World Championships.

Much less disruptively, I could probably train a bit more, and (barring injury) continue to get a bit faster, perhaps going under 5min/mile someday, although I'd have to reach down to 4:40 to begin having a reasonable shot at the finals - not sure if that will happen w/o substantial further investment. I could probably invest a bit more time (mostly overhead) in training-in-terrain (O'shoes, tape and such, even in VF park), so that my speed off-trail was maximized as a % of speed on-trail/road. I think that may already be pretty close though, at least for non-green, non-wet terrain.

One big thing that could help non-trivially is traveling more for orienteering. After Clem had been a DVOAer for 15+ years, I think he phrased it well in saying that he did a lot of 'pseudo-orienteering'. When the maps are getting pretty familiar, and the technique-set is relatively narrow, as it is when you've been in the same terrain/club for a long time, it's harder to keep the full arsenal of orienteering skills at the ready. New-to-me-map orienteering and several days in a row are key, I think. Travelling to a summer-week of orienteering in the US will likely be possible every summer starting next year as the kids will be 7 & 9, but it may be a few more years until the kids can easily travel with us to European events, at which point I'll be slowing more, esp. for the shorter distances... Perhaps a few more A-meets, combined with 1-day sight-seeing to keep it interesting for all, would be helpful too?

Hopefully I can swing something like this to continue to improve.

C • impressed 3

About 20 minutes warmup, including a fairly long/steep run up the prestart-to-start chute. No GPS track as that's not permitted on the course today. No cooldown :(

Middle Qualificaiton model event. Walked slowly up ~150m to the start with Viktoria (not logged), discussing various terrain features and mapping, which was somewhat inconsistent on the model map. Jogged the mostly downhill course, navigating fairly well, ex. two where I got off my compass line. Running on the compass here is always important off-trail...

Brought the wrong shoes, but taped and jogged anyway - probably good not to hammer this too hard as I was already a bit sore from yesterday.

Took it fairly easy to rest and due to shoes. Still moving quickly enough in unfamiliar terrain to get some benefit of learning the terrain features and mini route choices on the fly..

- When contouring on a vague attack, I should really check carefully the up/down contour count.
- When going somewhere vague (off trail, and off obvious contour feature), hold a bearing...

Back in good shoes, did a really fun Sprint training with Clem. Lessons learned:
- Have a bearing-related plan on every control. Most time lost was on a 'whee down the reentrant', when the control was really to the left of that about 30 degrees. - Stick to the bearing - again... (at least in cases where I'm going off easy-feature.)
- When checking left-right geometry options, and they look balanced, consider runnability - either visually or on the map - to break the tie.

Warmup with Clem - Eddie, thanks, set streamers.

Warmup for a Middle training day. Ran with Clem, Eddie and Sandra to the remote start, and didn't really see the map at all until I started. A good fresh training event, with lots to learn, in part due to the esp. bad contour mapping. Aside from the map issues, the terrain was absolutely beautiful, with plenty of downhill forest seconds where I could run under 4min/km (while the downhill lasted). Learned 3 lessons to use next week under the assumption that the WOC map is much better:
- Charcoal platforms here are brown X's, and can be small so are more visible from the top, hence aiming off slightly high (like 10-15m) on those makes sense.
- I need to hold a bearing harder - no need to get off it for many of these hills, and even if I do get off it for the hills, I should still set it and roughly track how far left/right of the line I'm going. This is esp. true on wide re-entrant crossings.
- There can be many subtle slope changes and 'shelves' on the hills, somewhat like French Creek, but even more distinct. These map be readable on the map - I should go early to my start and check out the warmup-clip-of-the-real-map to see if they're visible.

Hard S-9, walked 9-10, hard 10-F. Generally a reasonable run if I allow for the map-caused issues - many map issues worse than local DVOA maps, esp. contours, and imprecise relative locations. But it was still some great forest run and I salvaged some lessons learned.

Late eve. run after a long travel day from Chesterbrook at 4:45pm, to Miskolc at 6:15pm, the following day...

Chesterbrook loop

With Angelica, along Valley Stream 'canyon' and back. She was hot :)