Training Log Archive: cii00me9

Event: POCAR 48hr Rogaine
 

POCAR 2015. Second place for the fourth year in a row now :( with Garrison and Rocky33 (with various team mates) winning every time. This time we did not have our strongest team to start with (a key team member was in Japan) but we primarily fell victim to some poor preparations and partly to what seems to have been an organizer mistake.

The poor preparations amounted primarily to:
- for me personally, a late dinner with too much alcohol at some Russian friends' place the night before the race - and too little sleep because of that
- arriving too late to the race center, which in turn got us out of the start blocks significantly later that the winning team (when we, after running, arrived to the first checkpoint they were there just behind us and had already visited another CP as well)
- two of my team mates had forgot their primary head lamps at home and were thus forced to rely on much weaker back-up lamps once it got dark.

Loop 1: I think we made the optimal choice of route to minimize climb and tough terrain. Thanks to that and 100% clean navigation we arrived to the "HQ" only seconds after WABAR despite the very slow start.

Loop 3 (which we got to tackle as our second loop): Made it up to the F/W early to find out what "bonus" was waiting for us there. Got a spider web challenge, where we applied a "wheelbarrow" approach to quickly get through the net (As the lightest member, I was "walking" with my hands on Lyonya's back while the other guys carried my legs). For the extra eight bonus controls, rather than taking the simple loop around, we took a route choice that again enabled us to minimize climb (adding a little distance on the road instead - including passing the F/W again on our way out to fill up water - apparently surprising the Fragiles), which I think was smart. Two of the bonus controls were slightly misplaced vs the coordinates, but could quickly be found thanks to the clues given (which described the spot where the controls actually were). Our serious problems started towards the very end of this loop when I started feeling really unwell and threw up a first time. We also lost close to half an hour when the punch card (now in Lyonya's hands) disappeared, before it was found again. Another loss was a key piece of our towing line, which we decided not to go back looking for. Again navigation was close to 100% clean on this loop.

Our second visit to the HQ was a disaster for me since I could only watch my team mates refuel. I forced myself to down some of the hot Swedish blueberry soup which I normally love, only to threw up again soon after. The only thing that barely took me through loop 2 (our last loop) was a bottle of Coke, which my teammates kindly shared. Without the Coke, I don't think I could have finished the race - since I could not even drink water, and even less eat anything.

Throughout this last loop navigation was now solely in Lyonya's hands, since I had to focus on keeping myself moving, and we started loosing time on less than optimal route choices and some hickups in the navigation. The biggest blow came on the "cemetery" control which we ended up searching for in the wrong quadrant of the map, loosing at least an hour and a half, plus a lot of energy and self esteem since we thought it was our own mistake (after the race we heard from Garrison that the organizers had screwed up the coordinates of this control - and with hindsight we should of course have paid more attention to the description earlier to realize where the cemetary actually was on the map). This is also where we had to endure some rain and got our feet wet adding to the misery :). The last couple of controls were a pain with me and our new team mate, Vadik, (who was also suffering some potentially preventable physical issues - had we only prepared better) slowing down the team significantly. In the end I was happy to finish the race at all, and not too unhappy over loosing to the beasts of POCAR (Rachel and garrison) again.