Training Log Archive: bensmith

Queens Park setup.

Started a minute behind Gary Robbins, and caught him at about #4. Then it was a fun head-to-head race, with each of us making small mistakes. My main one was to #8, where I folded my map poorly and got confused about which building I was at. Super fun having the unexpected head-to-head racing!

Queens Park chase.

Started a few seconds behind Brent, and kept up on the first loop. Then the slight incline up to the bridge (I hesitate to call it a hill) started the hemorrhaging of time. Navigation was generally fine, and it was fun to have prior knowledge of what to expect at #20 (the one with the concentric circles of paths) - a few hesitations by others, but for some reason I knew what was going on... Any seconds gained there were soon lost on the huge set of stairs back up to the bridge!

Notes on Sprint Camp 2017

Overall I think things went well. But there's always room for improvement! Here are my thoughts:

Area selection - we ended up quite "parky" this year, with not much intricate urban (only Poirier and half of Stanley Park). Although the Scottish WOC was technically simple, that's likely to be the exception rather than the rule. If the aim is to be a training camp for our elite orienteers, we should aim to have more urban / campuses if possible.

Technicals - we should have full "mock races" for MeOS before the event, to ensure that things that worked trivially last year still work trivially this year. It seems something changed in the setup/chase handling, so chase start times couldn't be drawn this year and we had to use a punch (though the start team report that this is actually better for them as it reduces the stress a little bit).

Live results - seemed very popular, and seemed to work well. At dinner on Saturday some people couldn't connect as there were too many people connected to the wifi and it couldn't give out any more IP addresses! Having MeOS hang every 5 minutes while it exports the splits to the pi is quite annoying, but it's worth it to have a complete backup of the splits data somewhere that isn't on the laptop.

SI units - if we're borrowing SI units from other clubs, we should ensure they're synced with ours. It's embarrassing to see so many negative split times. (It's also tedious as attackpoint doesn't let you upload negative splits, so I had to manually fudge several hundred punch times.)

Mapping - we should really decide the areas further in advance. Patrick is finalising areas for SART now, 6 months before. I think we had decided 4 months before, but Christmas and the snow ate into a lot of that time. Good maps take a long time to make; ideally I would have spent much more time on all the maps improving their legibility etc.

Course planning - if the map already exists, there's no reason we can't plan courses months in advance. If the area changes, we can make last-minute tweaks. But aiming to have most courses ready ahead of time will help ensure there can be more input.

Last minute changes - should be avoided at all costs, and clearly communicated to everybody if required. The taping of the gaps at the start of the chase caused total confusion (not in the good way) and technically 95% of competitors should be disqualified for going through something that's mapped as a very wide uncrossable wall (but doesn't look like one).

Turkish food - is an excellent choice for post-camp eating.

GVOC clothing - looks incredible.

C • Good points... 10

Stage 4 - Setup - Elite Male - Splits

Stage 5 - Chase - Elite Male - Splits

Control-setting for stage 2 of Sprint Camp (Lafarge Lake). I'd had to plan backup courses earlier in the week due to the amount of snow, and these were the courses we ended up using. The first few legs were very poor, and possibly the worst legs I've ever planned for advanced orienteers. A real shame that we couldn't use the most technically interesting part of the map.

Otherwise, things seemed to go well. My cheeky control in a ditch seemed to trip up quite a few people - changing from "you'll see the control from miles away" to "you have to be on top of the control to see it" was unexpected so late in the race. The road-crossing marshals had a great view of all the confused competitors who got to the nearby trail junction and couldn't tell where the control was.

C • Very Cheeky 1

Super one-person relay at Poirier. Bobbled on the first control taking a very suboptimal route, but was otherwise fairly clean. Caught up some time towards the end by not following the pack and taking a more direct route to #2 on the last loop (i.e. not via #3...).

Lessons learned: ensure the finish chute is at least 6s of running, so people with flashing SI sticks (i.e. me) don't have to wait at the finish punch for the flashing to stop in order to punch. Meant that I drew with Brian instead of beating him!

"Visualise the control location" training session.

Pro tip - it's much easier to visualise if you spent 3 hours walking around the area doing map corrections recently.

Two-person relay at the new Citadel map. It was a slog through the snow, and this really highlighted some of the longer legs without much route choice.

I personally felt like there wasn't too much "action" in the race after the first control. A doubling of the control density would have made it much more intense. Having the teams set up so that all variations were possible on each leg probably hindered things - if there were separate options for legs 1/3 and 2/4, then each leg could have gone to more controls, without fear that they would then be going to the same controls next time.


This race was followed by hot-tub times (yay!) and stressful programming times getting the live results for the one-person relay working (boo!). MeOS exported the results as full-on relay results, rather than standard race results, and the XML format has basically no overlap with the parsing code I'd already written. Got it working eventually though!

Event: Vancouver Sprint Camp 2017 & GVOC WJR - Winter Warrior Series #2
 

First race of Sprint Camp. Skipped the training before due to admin and organisation, and didn't prepare enough for the race. Got flustered coming out of number 1 looking for a trail that didn't really exist, then continued onto a poor route choice. Hard slog through the snow for the second half of the race.

Lessons learned: get a mapper to check the area (even if just the areas near controls) and/or insist on having "on-the-ground" controllers.

Stage 1 - Elite Male - Splits

Fun course at QE park in the snow. Though the real highlight was picking up AWESOME NEW GVOC SWAG. It looks great. I'm sure it will help me soar like an eagle/thunderbird this weekend.

Interesting twist on route choices, given the 30cm of fresh pow in places. Roads >> trails >> forest >> grass. Probably erred too cautiously at times and should have gone a little more direct.

Snowy run from home to the WET at QE Park.

I have a new GPS watch (Garmin Forerunner 230), which has a cadence feature. It appears to have two purposes:
1) telling you what your average cadence is (~180 strides/minute this time, but not sure if that is too representative of my standard form as I'm sure I was taking shorter strides due to the ice).
2) shaming you when walking up hills. Not only does the graph show points lower on the Y axis, it also colours them orange and red. Yet to be seen whether this will suddenly motivate me to power up snow-covered slippery trails.