Training Log Archive: Bash

Hard Core Monday. 'Bent and I were both feeling a bit blah, but managed to talk ourselves into doing our weekly session. The DVD must be working, because all those crunches are starting to feel manageable. Maybe I'll have to move to twice a week (yikes).

I almost forgot to mention the most important victory of the weekend - the coveted GHO Flying Pig award. This is an actual battery-operated Flying Pig, which will be marked with the winner's initials and passed to a new individual each year based on their "distinguished performance" at the FP meet. There were good arguments to support giving this award to any one of our GHO members at the Pig, and Hammer made a particularly eloquent speech explaining why he felt he was worthy, then attempted to bribe the judge with a Roll-up-the-rim-to-win donut coupon. However, in the end, it was MrPither who prevailed, thanks to:
- his Sprint victory
- his muddy, face-first slide to the finish control in the relay
- wallowing in the vegetation enough to get a thorn in his eye during the Long race (which he wisely didn't finish)
- doing all of this at his very first Pig meet.

Flying Pig Long Distance

I'm removing myself from the Injury List with a modest amount of optimism, since I've finished races in the past two days with painful injuries, but after today's run, I felt like I did last Thursday. Not 100%, but no worse for the wear of the Pig, and that was my #1 goal of the weekend.

Oh yes, and the race. Well, overall, I suppose it wasn't too terrible since my goal was 75 minutes, but unfortunately, I had a disaster of Biblical proportions at Control #11 - The Rootstock In The Middle Of Nowhere. It's really annoying, now that I've had a chance to review the map with a vanload of O experts, one of whom called it a "Hail Mary" control, as the terrain was somewhat featureless, and there was nothing to catch you for a long time if you missed it - as I did.

We determined that the genesis of my error was hurrying away from a control too quickly, following an approximate SE bearing for 100 m to a trail where I planned the rest of my route, but ending up a good way north of where I'd wanted to be. I lost 10 minutes here - and some pride. I'm quite disappointed that I can still blow up that badly. There were a few other controls that were a bit ragged, but no other major league errors. Top female runners were around 66 minutes, so it wasn't a super-fast course for anyone. Oh well, maybe Barebones will be my first good Long Distance race at an A meet?

We'd put some pressure on Hammer to win this event to give GHO a gold medal sweep in all 4 events of the Flying Pig weekend. He came through, finishing almost 2 minutes ahead of 2nd place. Nice work! (Hmm.... he tells me that he is a Middle Distance specialist, but he seems to keep winning the Long...)

Flying Pig Sprint

It's not often that I say this, but I was pleased with my speed in this race. Too bad about the navigation. I had over 2 minutes of errors, which should be almost impossible in a sprint! All the same, I can't complain too much about my time. I was the 4th woman of 23 on the Green/Brown/Orange sprint course, and 24th out of 85 racers on the course, including men. That's good news for my North American Sprint Series rank. Sprint Finals Weekend, here I come! ;-)

Other good news is that my knee didn't hurt TOO much, and the injured foot wasn't a factor.

MrPither smoked his sprint course, finishing over 20 seconds ahead of 2nd place - who happened to be another GHO member, Hammer. Awesome!

Flying Pig Relay (U.S. Relay Championships)

So finally we got to the race that had given me butterflies for the past few days. It's one thing to screw up my own races, but I really, REALLY didn't want to be the one to ruin things for my highly competent teammates - Sudden, Griz and Hammer. Yikes, could there be more pressure than that? Racing with a Swede and two guys with a zillion North Am Champs medals between them?

Sudden led off with a good leg. This afternoon's race was the opposite of this morning. I navigated well to each control (with one poor route choice that cost me a couple of minutes), but I went slowly. Just as well - it was a very physical race, with lots of scrambling up and down steep, muddy sides of valleys. (As a result of today, Sudden has convinced me that I should at least try orienteering shoes.)

About 2/3 of the way through the race, I turned my right ankle, and my foot pain returned with a vengeance. EEYYOWWW!! I hobbled up a big, mucky hill, gasping in pain the whole way, then gritted my teeth for the rest of my run. I was too sore to cool down.

Meanwhile, Griz went out and had a great leg, followed by Hammer, who anchored our team with a stellar performance. (An honourable mention is due to MrPither for his cooperative response to our calls of "Slide, Patrick, slide!" at the muddy finish chute.)

Result - we were 1st overall, but not eligible to become the U.S. Relay Champions, so that honour went to the 2nd place team. Still, our Pig medals are pretty cool! Looking at the results for the race leg that I did, there were two F21 women ahead of my time, and I was 7th of 14 runners overall. I was extremely relieved to finish without doing anything TOO embarrassing.

Sprint O/Br/Green - Splits

Event: Flying Pig X (OCIN)
 

Flying Pig Middle Distance

A good race (for me), although a bit on the slow side. Not much time lost to navigation errors, and minimal regret over route choice when I reviewed it later. Based on unofficial results, it looks like I was 1st woman of any age (out of 11 women) on the Green course, and in the top 25% of all Green course racers (11th of 46).

Sudden got us off to a good start by winning this race, with Griz taking the silver medal, and Hammer and MrPither close on their heels.

I always think that I should have my best results in Long Distance O races because I train for multi-day adventure racing, but Hammer keeps telling me that I'm a Middle Distance specialist. I don't know - maybe he's right, and if so, I should do more speed training before all the big O races later this year. My Long Distance O race results have never been too impressive, in spite of my belief that they should go well.

After 10 days of taking it easy, I was afraid that this race would aggravate my foot injury and possibly end my weekend of racing. Well, I was focused so hard on my foot that I forgot to wear my knee brace - so guess what hurts! I was limping by dinnertime, and spent awhile icing my knee later on.

While watching the Daily Show. (Laughing out loud is good for the abs.) It's time to add weights to increase the difficulty of some of the exercises.

Such a beautiful spring day! I wanted to get my heart rate up without putting any stress on my injured foot, so I rode Duffy's Lane to the rail trail. The rail trail was nice and dry - great for pushing hard, but the portion of Duffy's Lane that is closed in winter still has big sections of slick ice and soft snow, with some goopy mud for variety. I got covered in mud from head to toe - good practice for The Pig. There was so much water that I stopped to look for our local beaver family in their favourite area beside the road, but they didn't seem to be out yet.

Here's that article on the relationship between core (including hip) strength/flexibility and running injuries.

Light trail run with ThunderDog. This was a test to see if I'll be able to go to the Flying Pig this weekend. I stretched and warmed up much better than usual, then ran with a cautious almost-flat foot for the first half. My foot hurt, but didn't progress to the knife-sharp pain I was getting that felt like I was ripping it apart. So in the last 10 minutes, I tried running off-trail up hills (I remember the odd hill in Ohio), and it went OK except for some weird stiffness around the upper back of my heel by the end. Anyway, since it doesn't feel like I'm causing damage, I'm off to the Pig - yay! It may not be my best-ever performance, but it's better than missing it entirely. The longest race is last, so I can always skip it if my foot isn't feeling good.